It is difficult to imagine large construction sites without excavators. It all started with a cable machine, but, of course, steam excavators received recognition.
The mechanism of the American William Otis is considered to be the beginning of the constructed steam engines of this type. In 1836, Otis collects the first version of his invention and tries to patent it, but a series of failures (fire in the bureau, delays, etc.) led to the fact that the date of birth of steam excavators is considered to be 1839.
Steam shovel - * Steam Shovel * by William Otis.
The inventor calls his creation “a crane shovel for excavation and soil removal,” but people quickly renamed it the “Otis Shovel”. The first "Shovels" were weak and clumsy - the power was about twenty l / s, and the boom could rotate only one hundred and eighty degrees. Such a unit could only be transported by rail.
* Western Railway *, Massachusetts, 1839
Nevertheless, the "Otis Shovel" performed such a volume of work that it replaced one hundred and twenty people (according to modern researchers), the productivity was equal to one hundred cubic meters of land per hour. The mechanism of William Otis makes a tremendous impression on people - literally crowds gathered to see how the miracle machine works.
William Otis built seven of his cars, the first of which began working in 1938, helping to lay the Western Massachusetts Railroad, and the latter worked long enough, and only broke down in 1905 on the laying of the Chicago Railroad in Illinois.
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Five cars were sold to other countries and shipped worldwide. For example, in England one of them worked in the county of Essex. And also on the "piece of iron". And even in Russia "Otis's Shovel" also visited: in 1842, Georgiy Georgievich Whistler was building a railway "between Moscow and St. Petersburg" using the American miracle mechanism.
Ruston Proctor Steam Navvy.
In Europe, the enterprise of the engineer Joseph Rustom "Ruston & Proctor & Co." also builds its own versions of steam excavators, competitively even more successful than overseas colleagues: by 1877, this company produced about a hundred machines, some were purchased by the United States and used in the construction of the Manchester Shipping Canal. Rastom supplied his devices to Russia, having won a tender in 1890.
To this day, not so many steam excavators have survived. Most of them are in museums (although there is one abandoned in Alaska). But there is probably only one working device. Watch the video showing the operation of this remarkable device, found at the bottom of a flooded chalk pit and rebuilt in 2013 at the Mining Museum in England.
