The development of technical and engineering achievement of the National Exhibition in Commemoration of the First Centenary of the Opening of the Ports of Brazil to the International Trade in 1908 motivated engineer Augusto Ramos to imagine a cable car system in Rio de Janeiro. Ramos had to resort to well-known personages of Rio's high society. These included Eduardo Guinles and Raymundo Ottoni de Castro Maya, who were powerful figures with a range of developmental interests in the city, to promote the idea of an electric cable system. When the cable car was built, there were only two others in the world: the chairlift at Mount Ulia, in Spain, with a length of , built in 1907, and the lift at Wetterhorn, in Switzerland, with a length of , built in 1908.