Check this out.
Steam shovels are one of the steampunkest kinds of machine around. The steam shovel, or “steam navvy” if you’re British, was basically the first mechanical digger. They first appeared in the 1830s and remained in production until the 1930s, with the last working examples believed to have gone out of service in the 1960s. They were ubiquitous heavy plant machinery, used in construction, quarrying and mining in their various forms.
They were an American invention, devised by the young engineer William Otis in 1836 and patented in 1839, arising from the unprecedented need for heavy earthworks created by railway building. It’s this model that you see above.
I suspect steam shovels are going to come up a lot on this blog, so I’ll just give you the basics here as they relate to this early machine.
First of all, although the quintessential steampunk material is iron (with huge rivets), Otis’ shovel was mostly made of wood, with iron only used for mechanical parts and reinforcement. The wood-burning steam engine did the hardest part of the job, namely raising and lowering the bucket and moving the machine itself. On that first machine, manpower was needed to move the jib from side to side and to empty the full bucket, though in later versions the steam engine would also cover this.
In those days before the caterpillar track was invented, the best way to prevent this heavy fellow from sinking into the muddy ground was to mount it on temporary rails. One of the improvements to the Otis design was to set the wheels 4′ 8 1/2″ inches apart, the standard gauge for railways, which meant that it could be transported to site by coupling it up to a train.
With this and many other refinements, Otis’ invention was an outstanding success and, as it was the ancestor of so much of our modern plant machinery, Otis really deserved to get rich from his invention. No doubt he would have done, had he not contracted typhoid a short while after receiving his patent. He was only 26 at the time of his death, and who knows what else he might have achieved had he lived?
Sources
http://www.watercrunch.com/2009/02/young-william-otis-moved-earth.html
Manktelow, Peter, Steam Shovels, Shire Publications, UK 2001. ISBN: 0-7478-0483-4
Real Steampunk 