The old shovel’s wheels had sunk deep into the ground. The wooden house was rotted, the boiler was shot. In the process of jacking up the frame, Kelly was able to see the serial plate. “Then I knew right away what it was,” he says.
The shovel is a 1913 Type-O model by the Thew Automatic Shovel Company of Lorain, Ohio. It was designed by Captain Richard Thew, who was an ore boat captain on the Great Lakes. He is credited with inventing the first fully rotating steam shovel in 1895. The Type-O was one of the smallest of Thew’s models. He designed it with a horizontal crowd, which gives the bucket a horizontal movement before curving up. This prevented the bucket from tearing up the wooden docks – as did the prevailing buckets of the day – when loading and unloading ore.
No comments:
Post a Comment