Peaks and glaciers for everyone: The role of cog railways and cable cars for a changing view on the Alps since the late 19th century

This presentation looks at the verticality of Alpine tourism since the last third of the 19th century. When the travellers of the 17th and 18th century crossed the Alps on their Grand Tour to Italy, a remarkable change of perception took place: The Alps were no longer a horrible place to pass through, but a sublime one to admire. By the end of the 18th century, Alpinism to climb up even the highest peaks developed, mostly driven by a scientific interest in geology, botany and glaciology. Only by the mid-19th century, a new sportive and competitive way of mountain climbing arose, dominated by mostly British bourgeois mountain climbers. This presentation, however, deals with the long process after the “Golden Age of Alpinism” (1850s and 1860s). From the 1870s onwards, Alpine peaks and glaciers were made accessible for a larger, non-sportive group of aristocratic and bourgeois tourists, who arrived in the Alps from the densely populated areas by train and could then reach the top of the mountains with cog-railways and cable cars. Numerous advertising posters from the Belle Époque show the change of perspective and mirror the dreams of an upcoming mass-tourism society. Photographical self-representation became important and reminds of present-day social media. After a cut of this development by World War I, a new phase of ascending the Alps with technical means began. In the 1930s, the first T-bar lifts became popular among downhill skiers, and after World War II, the European Recovery Program was co-responsible for the rapid establishment of skiing resorts in occupied Austria. The “great acceleration of the mountains” (Robert Gross) started and once again changed the view on the Alps for an even larger mass of Alpine tourists. The paper will show the most important developments of Alpine tourism infrastructure and will focus also on a comparison of the different Alpine countries to carve out parallels and national/regional peculiarities.