(Update: I thought these docks were along the canal in Buffalo. Now (Nov 2023), I think they were the Bethlehem Steel docks in Lackawanna.)
At the beginning of the 20th Century, the waterfront had both the old (Brownhoist) and new (Hulett) technologies for unloading ore from freighters.
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| Association for Great Lakes Maritime History posted An image of Brown hoists unloading iron ore from the freighter E.J. Earling at Buffalo, New York, circa 1908 (Image Source: Library of Congress – Detroit Publishing Co. Collection). The equipment is clamsheel hoists built by the Brown Hoist Machinery Co. Beginning in the 1880s, Brown developed a variety machinery that revolutionized the unloading of iron ore from ships in the Great Lakes region. Additional Historical Information – Brown Hoisting Machinery Co. In 1880, Fayette Brown and his son, Alexander Ephraim Brown, founded the Brown Hoisting & Conveying Machinery Co. in Cleveland, Ohio. The firm was incorporated in 1893 and was renamed the Brown Hoisting Machinery Co. in 1900. Alexander Brown was a mechanical engineer who was focused on finding a better technology for unloading iron ore from Great Lakes freighters. The shipment of the region’s ore by water began in 1855. For the next 25 years, unloading a ship was a labor-intensive process. Workers would hand shovel iron ore from the top of the pile in the ship’s cargo hold up a multi-decked scaffold to the deck. The ore would then be hand shoveled into wheelbarrows that would be pushed down the vessel’s gangway and dumped in a dock stockpile or waiting rail car. The only major improvement prior to 1880 had been the replacement of the scaffolding with skips that were lifted by derricks from the ship’s hold onto its deck. The ore, however, was still hand shoveled from the deck into wheelbarrows that were pushed down the gangway. In 1880, Brown revolutionized the unloading process by producing a cable tramway that carried skips of ore directly from the ship’s hold to the dockside stockpile or rail cars. An improved cableway and self-loading skips that resembled dragline buckets followed. Under the brand name Brownhoist, Alexander Brown later developed the first clamshell type unloader featuring a 1.5-ton bucket suspended from a traveling bridge crane. By 1900, an estimated 75 percent of iron ore shipped on the Great Lakes was handled by Brownhoist equipment. In the decades that followed, Brownhoist went on to manufacture bridge, gantry, Portal-Pier (“whirley”), and locomotive cranes. The company also produced clamshell and dragline buckets and a wide range of machinery designed specifically for steel production and industrial material handling. Brown Hoisting Machinery merged with Industrial Works of Bay City, Mich. in 1927 to form the Industrial Brownhoist Corp. The new firm was headquartered in Bay City. After decades of growth, however, its business fell off sharply after World War II. In 1954, Industrial Brownhoist was sold to Penn-Texas Corp. which sold it five years later to a hotel group based in Miami Beach, Fla. As business continued to decline, the operation shrank to 40 employees and one plant in Bay City. In 1960, the operation was acquired by the American Hoist & Derrick Co. of St. Paul, Minn. After a relatively brief period of success under new ownership, what was now sole plant of the Industrial Brownhoist Division of American Hoist was permanently shut down in 1983. Information Source: |
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| ConstructionEquipment "When conventional means of removing shot rock from the floor to the banks of the Chicago Drainage Canal proved uneconomical at $1.75 per cubic yard, several contractors approached Brownhoist for a solution. The result was the world’s first cantilever, or hammerhead, crane. Introduced in 1893, 11 of these cranes did the job for one-third that amount. They were resold for other uses after the project was finished, and one of them was later adapted as a dragline for construction of the New York Barge Canal. No other applications of these machines for excavation are known at this time, but mobile hammerhead cranes of various makes are known to have placed concrete at Grand Coulee, Friant and Folsom dams in the 1930s through 1950s, and hammerhead tower cranes are widely used today." [Alexander E. Brown also invented the dragline and clamshell buckets.] |
Association for Great Lakes Maritime History posted two photos with the comment:
Two images of the freighter William S. Mack being unloaded by Hulett Ship Unloaders at the Pennsylvania Railroad iron ore dock in Buffalo, New York, circa 1901-1910 (Image Source: Library of Congress – Detroit Publishing Co. Collection). Additional Historical Information – Hulett Ship Unloaders George Hulett, the inventor of the Hulett Ship Unloader, was born in 1846 in Conneaut, Ohio. His family moved in Cleveland shortly after his birth. After completing his education in 1864, Hulett ran a general store in Unionville, Ohio for many years but returned to Cleveland in 1881. The 1880s were a period of rapid change in the technology used to load and unload bulk cargo from ships in the Great Lakes region. In 1880, the Brown Hoist Machinery Co. of Cleveland introduced a fully mechanized system for moving iron ore from a ship’s hold to dockside. The system could scoop up and move up to 1.5 tons of ore at a time. Between 1887 and 1906, Hulett received several patents for a variety of industrial conveying and hoisting machinery. His greatest patents, however, were awarded in 1898 for what became known as the Hulett Ship Unloader and the bucket the machine needed to revolutionize the unloading process for shipments of iron ore. At first, the machine was merely theoretical, but Hulett was able to set up a meeting with steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie was interested but wanted to see it work before buying one. Hulett was able convince a Cleveland-based company to take the leap of faith and build a Hulett Ship Unloader on spec at a cost of $45,000. In 1899, Carnegie and Charles Schwab, his company’s president, arrived in Cleveland for a demonstration of a prototype. They saw the steam-powered machine, which was said to resemble a grasshopper arm, on a gantry built over railroad tracks. The machine lowered its arm - overbalanced by 6,000 pounds so gravity powered its descent - into a ship’s hold. The bucket at the end of the arm, which had a clamshell opening, grabbed up 10 tons of iron ore and deposited into waiting rail cars. The entire process to grab and dump one the ore took about a minute. The first Hulett Ship Unloader was installed in Conneaut in 1899. Powered by steam, the machine had a bucket capable of moving 10 tons of ore at a time. In 1912, four second-generation Huletts were built on Whiskey Island in Cleveland. These units were powered by electricity and had buckets capable of handling up to 17 tons of ore at a time. The Whiskey Island machines significantly lowered the cost of receiving iron ore in Cleveland and helped make that city one of the major steel producing centers in the world. In the years that followed, Hulett Ship Unloaders came to dominate the handling of iron at ports in the Great Lake region, including Buffalo and Chicago. That dominance lasted until the 1970s and the widespread use of self-unloading vessels. As of 1999, six Hulett Ship Unloaders were still standing around the Great Lakes region including four at Whiskey Island. All were subsequently dismantled but two were carefully disassembled in hopes they might be reconstructed in the future as historic landmarks. Information Sources: https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/470 https://www.popularmechanics.com/.../hulett-unloader.../
[Additional text provides the freighter's history.]
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| 2 bygonely, 18th photo |
I've never seen this kind of bulk unloader before.
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| bygonely, 36th photo, circa 1901 |
The caption on this photo called it a Thornberger hoist and confirmed that it was at the Lackawanna docks.
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| bygonely, 43rd photo |
The Thornberger hoist was replaced by the Brown hoist.
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| bygonely, 44th photo, circa 1908. |
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| Brian R. Wroblewski posted |
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| Dennis DeBruler commented on Brian's post A nice shot that shows how an articulated tug fits together. I fired up Google Earth to determine this shot is older than June 2014 because that is when today's dome appears. https://maps.app.goo.gl/waeapNiuxK2uAnLc7 |
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| Brian commented on Dennis' comment correct I shot that in the summer of 2013. |
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