FORKLIFT trucks have had a good innings. They first appeared a century ago, at a time of labour shortage brought about by the recruitment of much of Britain’s supply of burly men to fight in the first world war. Now, though, further innovation may make them disappear again. And that is no figure of speech, for a group of German engineers have asked themselves if they can cause the trucks themselves to vanish, leaving only the forks behind.

Karl Heinz Wehking of the University of Stuttgart and his colleagues have stripped away from a forklift everything not needed for the task of carrying things: the engine compartment, the steering wheel and other driver controls, the rest of the body, and the mast up and down which the fork moves. All they have retained are the two, now separate, tines of the fork itself.

These skids, as Dr Wehking calls the liberated tines, are no longer dumb pieces of iron. Instead, they ride on four wheels of their own, each of which has its own electric motor. This means every wheel can rotate either forwards or backwards independently of the others. Each skid also has sensors and a control unit that, among other things, keeps it parallel with its buddy as they move around a warehouse floor. The result is two sleek metal beams narrow and low enough to glide under a standard EURO pallet.

To lift such a pallet, every wheel has a jack. This is a threaded bar connecting it to the rest of the skid, which can be rotated to raise or lower the skid by up to two centimetres. Such a system will not be able to heave things onto shelves. But automatic lifts which can do that already exist, and the expense of having to install them will, Dr Wehking thinks, be outweighed by the skids’ manoeuvrability. Besides going forwards and backwards like an existing forklift they can shuffle sideways, and can also swing round on the spot in a full circle.

This manoeuvrability, and their lack of height, means a pair of skids can go where a forklift cannot. A fleet of them might thus be brought to bear simultaneously on a task which can now be done by only one forklift at a time—such as unloading a lorry or a shipping container. That would speed things up a lot. This, and the cheapness of skids compared with trucks, should give skids a sizeable advantage over the existing way of doing things.