Pallet jack
material-handling equipment
A pallet jack, also known as a pallet truck or pallet pump, is a tool used to lift and move pallets. Pallet jacks are the most basic form of a forklift and are intended to move palletized loads within warehouses, distribution centers, retail stores, and construction sites.
Operational principle
The jack is steered by a tiller-like lever called a 'tow bar' that also acts on the pump piston for raising the forks. A small lever on the tow bar's steering handle releases the hydraulic fluid, causing the forks to lower. The steering wheels are located directly below the tow bar and support the jacking mechanism.
The front wheels inside the end of the forks are mounted on push rods attached to linkages that go to levers attached to the jack cylinder. As the hydraulic jack at the 'tiller' end is raised, the links force the wheels down, raising the forks vertically above the front wheels, raising the load upward until it clears the floor. The pallet is only lifted enough to clear the floor for subsequent travel. Oftentimes, pallet jacks are used to move and organize pallets inside a trailer, especially when there is no forklift truck access or availability.
History
Manual pallet jacks have existed since at least 1918, following the introduction of pallets.
“Pallet jack” enters the record as material-handling equipment. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pallet, jack and material-handling can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q830071. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pallet jack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.