A dock leveler is a hinged steel or aluminum ramp built into the edge of a warehouse loading dock, closing the gap and matching the height difference between the dock floor and the bed of whatever truck trailer is backed up against it, so that a forklift or hand truck can drive straight across between the two without a step or a slope steep enough to tip a load. Early versions were simple mechanical ramps raised by hand and held level by a counterweight or a locking bar; hydraulic and later air-powered levelers let a dock worker raise, lower, and extend the ramp at the push of a button, and can automatically follow a trailer bed that rises or sinks slightly as it is loaded or unloaded. Because trailer heights and dock heights are not perfectly standardized across carriers and eras, the leveler's telescoping lip, which slides out to actually bridge onto the trailer floor, has to accommodate a range of several inches in either direction. The device is now a near-universal fixture of the truck-based loading dock, wherever pallets move by forklift between a building and a trailer.
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Source What Was the First Loading Dock? - Beuschel Sales, Inc.
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1. What Was the First Loading Dock? - Beuschel Sales, Inc.
Body
In 1953 Gary Kelley invented the first counterbalanced dock leveler
In Field: Industrial Engineering, Page text
It’s easier to talk about the modern loading dock and how the system of safely loading and unloading goods came about with Kelley’s first counterbalanced dock leveler.
In Group: Warehouse and Material Handling Systems, Page text
It’s easier to talk about the modern loading dock and how the system of safely loading and unloading goods came about with Kelley’s first counterbalanced dock leveler.
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