European industrial and technical heritage

 Nikola Benin Ph.D

For the general public, but also for a lot of heritage organizations, cranes are a much overlooked part of our industrial heritage and their knowledge of horizontal transport is much more than their knowledge of vertical transport. Steam locomotives and ships are already part of our common heritage, in contrast to our ancient wooden city cranes, steel Fairbairn cranes or shipyard and harbour cranes. Without these cranes there would have been no high-rising buildings, nor had the enormous development of ports been possible. Our daily life and the landscape, we live in, has dramatically changed due to cranes.