The Machine That Dug More in One Day Than a Hundred Men With Shovels

The Machine That Dug More in One Day Than a Hundred Men With Shovels For all of history the earth was moved by a man's back. Then one machine dug more in a day than a hundred men with shovels ever could. In 1839 a 26-year-old named William Otis patented a machine that dug with a steam-powered iron arm, and he was dead within the year. This is the biography of that machine: how it grew up in two Ohio towns, Bucyrus and Marion, into 95-ton giants, and how it graded the railroads and took whole mountains apart for copper. Then it dug the Panama Canal, 102 steam shovels through the Culebra Cut, moving 260 million cubic yards. But the machine did the digging of a hundred men without sparing a single one, and thousands of West Indian laborers died beside it in the rock and the slides. SOURCES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William... https://handwiki.org/wiki/Company:Buc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_... https://www.czbrats.com/Builders/Stea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culebra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor... If you care about the machines and the men who rebuilt this country, subscribe to Global Old History. This channel lives or dies on it. #history #engineering #panamacanal