Winches and hoists have been traced back to the Greeks, who considered them their “deus ex machina” or “god of the machine.”

A hoist is a winch that raises and lowers battens, electric sets, scenery, orchestra shells, and almost anything else. In this chapter, we will be using the terms “winch” and “hoist” interchangeably. There are dead haul winches that lift the entire weight of the flown element and there are counterweight assist winches, where the weight of the flown element is partially counterbalanced by a counterweight allowing the hoist to lift only the imbalanced weight of the system. At a minimum, a hoist has one lift line, more often they have two or more. There are three types of dead haul winches: the line shaft winch, the drum winch and the traveling drum, or zero fleet, winch. Line shaft winches have multiple cable drums connected to each other and the gear reducer with a shaft. A drum winch has a single cable drum with the cable or cables coming off of that one drum.