CRANES (MACHINE HISTORY)
ORIGINS OF THE MODERN DAY CRANE
A crane is a lifting machine
equipped with a winder, wire ropes or chains and sheaves that can be
used both to lift and lower materials and to move them horizontally.
Put in basic terms, it uses one or more simple machines to create
mechanical advantage to enable the movement of loads beyond the
normal capability of a human.
The principles of operation of today's CRANE EQUIPMENT is taken for
granted, however, we thought you might be interested in learning a
bit about the history of the Crane and its development into the
modern age of technology.
CRANE EQUIPMENT AND
CONSTRUCTION OF THE PANAMA RAILWAY
While the Camino Real, and later the Las Cruces trail, served
communication across the isthmus for over three centuries, by the 19th
century it was becoming clear that a cheaper and faster alternative was
required. Given the difficulty of constructing a canal with the
available technology, a railway seemed an excellent opportunity. Studies
were carried out to this end as early as 1827; several schemes were
proposed, and foundered for want of capital. However, by the middle of
the century, several factors turned in favor of a link: the acquisition
of Upper California by the United States in 1848, and the increasing
movement of settlers to the west coast, created a demand for a fast
route between the oceans, which was fuelled even farther by the
discovery of gold in California.
 The
Panama Railway was built across the isthmus from 1850 to 1855, running
47 miles (76 km) from Colón, on the Atlantic Coast, to Panama City on
the Pacific.
In May 1850, the first sod was turned on the railroad construction but
very quickly, the difficulty of the scheme became apparent.
Much of the route was
through jungle swamps, the heat was stifling, mosquitoes were everywhere
and deluges of rain for almost half the year required some of the
workers to work in water up to four feet deep. The swamps were
apparently endlessly deep often requiring over a hundred feet (30 m) of
gravel backfill to secure a roadbed. The only power equipment they had
was the railroad and its locomotives; the rest of the work had to be
done by pick and shovel and mule cart.
All supplies and nearly
all food stuffs had to be imported from the United States greatly adding
to the cost of construction. By the early 1850s, the Panama Railroad
Company had dredged about 260 hectares of the swamps on Manzanillo
Island for their headquarters and a railway terminal.
 By
July 1852 they had finished 23 miles (37 km) of track and reached the
Chagres River where a massive bridge had to be built. The first wooden
bridge they built failed when the Charges river rose over 40 feet (12.2
m) in a day and washed it away.
Workers then started work
on a much higher 300 foot long massive iron bridge which took over a
year to finish. In all over 170 more bridges and culverts had to be
built.
In January, 1854
excavation began at the summit of the Continental Divide, where the
earth had to be cut down over 40 feet. Several months were spent digging
this cut. The road over the crest of the continental divide, at Culebra,
was finally completed from the Atlantic side in January 1855,
thirty-seven miles (60 km) of track having been laid from Colón (then
call Aspinwall).
 A second team, working
under less harsh conditions with railroad track, ties, railroadcars,
locomotives and other supplies brought around Cape Horn by ship,
completed their eleven-mile (18 km) of track from Panamá City to the
summit on the Pacific side of the Isthmus on a rainy midnight on January
27, 1855.
Lit by sputtering whale oil lamps, the last rail was set in
place on pine crossties. The final spike was held in position and George Totten, chief engineer, in a pouring rain with a nine-pound maul drove
the spike that completed the railroad. The next day the first locomotive
with passenger cars passed from sea to sea. The massive project was
done! Upon completion the road stretched 47 miles, 3,020 feet (76
km) with a maximum grade of sixty feet to the mile (11.4 m/km or 1.14%).
They now had the job of making things permanent and up grading the
railroad. Hastily erected Wooden bridges that quickly decayed in the
tropical heat and often torrential rain had to be replaced with Iron
bridges. Wooden trestles had to be converted to gravel embankments. The
original pine ties only lasted about a year and they had to be replaced
with lignum vitae ties, a wood so hard that they had to drill the ties
before nailing the spikes.
 The
railway cost some $8 million USD to build (eight times the initial
estimate in 1850), and presented considerable engineering challenges,
going over mountains and through swamps. Over 300 bridges and culverts
needed to be built along the route. It was built and financed by
private companies from the United States.
Among key individuals in
building the railway were William H. Aspinwall, David Hoadley, George
Muirson Totten (chief engineer of the project), and John Lloyd Stephens.
The railroad was built and originally owned by a publicly traded
corporation based in New York City, the Panama Rail Road Company, which
was chartered by the State of New York on April 7, 1849, and the stock
in which would eventually become some of the most highly valued of the
era. The company bought exclusive rights from the government of Colombia
(then known as Republic of New Granada of which Panama was a part) to
build the railroad across the isthmus.
The railway carried
significant traffic even while it was under construction, with traffic
carried by canoe and mules over the unfinished sections. This had not
been originally intended, but people crossing the isthmus to California
and returning back east were eager to use such track as had been laid.
When only 7 miles (10 km) of track had been completed the railway was
doing a brisk business, charging $0.50 per mile per person for the train
ride, increasing to $25 per person when the line was finally completed.
By the time the line was officially completed and the first revenue
train ran over the full length of its grade on January 28, 1855, more
than one-third of its eight million dollar cost had already been paid
for from fares and freight tariffs.
 The
fare for first class passage was set at $25.00 one way, one of the
highest rates in existence for a 47 miles (76 km) ride. High prices for
carrying freight and passengers, despite very expensive on-going
maintenance and up grades, made the railroad one of the most profitable
in the world. Engineering and medical difficulties made the Panama
Railway the most expensive railway (per unit length of track) built at
the time.
The railroad's, steam
shovels, enormous steam powered cranes, rock crushers, cement mixers,
dredges, and pneumatic power drills used to drill holes for explosives
were some of the new pieces of construction equipment used to construct
the canal. Nearly all this new equipment was built by new, extensive
machine building technology developed and built in the United States.
The death toll:
It is estimated that from
6,000 to 12,000 people may have died in construction of the railroad,
though the Panama Railway company kept no official count and the total
may be higher or lower. Cholera, malaria and yellow fever killed
thousands of workers. These railroad workers were from the United
States, Europe, Colombia, China, the Caribbean islands, and also
included some African slaves. Many of these workers had come to Panama
to seek their fortune, and had arrived with little or no identification.
Many died with no known next of kin, nor permanent address, nor even a
known last name.
The dire warnings
of the perils to be faced in Panama from climate and malignant disease
dissuaded many Americans from coming, but other nationalities - Irish,
Hindus, Chinese, English, French, Germans, Malays - responded to the
call. Workers died in large numbers, but the railroad company did its
best to discredit the notion that this death rate was in any way out of
the ordinary. The company’s attitude inspired such statements in
the Star & Herald as follows: “As to all the nonsense about malaria,
fever, pestilential swamps and the thousand other ills that are charged
to the Isthmus, we report again, they exist no more than in any other
tropical climate, and that prudence and ordinary precaution is all that
is required on the part of unacclimated newcomers to our sunny shores.”
In their secret
deliberations the board of directors of the company must have commented
upon the exorbitant toll of human life taken by cholera, dysentery,
sunstroke and accidents, although such factors did not greatly worry
nineteenth-century men of business, who regularly sent young children
into dank coal mines and worked women in unheated, dimly lit textile
mills for a few cents a day.
Cadaver trade:
Disease and exhaustion took a heavy toll on the workers. Because it was
not known that mosquitoes, which thrived in Panama's swampy conditions,
were spreading disease, no attempts were made to eliminate the
mosquitoes or prevent them from biting the workers. The disposal of
unidentifiable bodies was a boon to mostly paid for the medical
facilities. Medical schools and teaching hospitals needed cadavers to
train budding physicians, and paid handsomely for anonymous bodies
pickled in barrels shipped up from the tropics. The Panama Railroad
Company itself sold the corpses abroad, and the income generated was
sufficient to maintain the Company's own hospital. A journalist reported
sighting the chief doctor at the Panama Railroad Company's hospital
conscientiously bleaching skeletons of dead workers, in hopes of
compiling a skeletal museum of all the known races working on the
railroad.
The tragedy of the 1,000-man
Chinese contingent:
The railroad company had
purchased the services of coolies from a Canton labor contractor under a
system similar to that of the British indentured servants sent to
Virginia and Georgia during the seventeenth century. The company agreed
to pay the contractor $25 a month for each man sent, and then the
contractor made his own arrangements with the individual coolie,
generally doling out four to eight dollars a month in wages and
retaining the remainder as payment for ocean passage and food. It was a
slave system, but the Panama Railroad Company was not averse to using
slaves if they would help complete the road.
 Under the terms of the
labor contract the Chinese contractor agreed to furnish cooks and mess
facilities for the coolies, and the railroad company was supposed to
maintain in its commissary Chinese food such as dried oysters,
cuttlefish, bamboo sprouts, sweet rice crackers, salted cabbage,
vermicelli, tea, and hill rice. The contract also specified that the
Chinese would have joss houses and opium. The railroad recruiters had
agreed to stock the drug in the company commissary along with the
Chinese food. The coolies had brought with them priests to staff the
joss house who set up racks of pipes and the necessary yen she gow
scraper tools. On Saturday nights and all day Sunday, after an 80-hour
work week, the entire Chinese crew lolled about, smiling drunkenly in
the sickly sweet smoke from the pipes.
The Irish workers,
although they engaged in violent alcoholic binges during their own
off-hours, were shocked by the “heathenish, idolatrous practice of opium
smoking.” One of their number, distinguished among his fellows by his
ability to read and write, wrote a letter to a Catholic priest in New
York accusing the Panama Railroad Company of trafficking in drugs. The
letter appeared in the New York Herald. The railroad company directors
were not especially concerned about the letter until a bookkeeper
pointed out that the cost of the opium furnished to the Chinese amounted
to 15 cents a day per man. This was an expense of $150 a day, and a
criminal act to boot!
They wrote Totten that the
Panama Railroad Company was chartered under the laws of the State of New
York, and the laws of that state forbade the unlicensed dispensing of
drugs. Because of the illegality, the directors said, no more opium for
coolies would be imported. Of course the laws of New York also forbade
the employment of slave labor, but the directors were not concerned with
that technicality. Busy as always with many problems, Totten decided to
ignore the company order, and made a note to inform the commissary that
the drug was to be imported as usual. Before the commissary was
informed, Totten was stricken with an attack of fever and no one knew of
his decision.
One day several weeks later, as Totten lay on a cot in his iron hut near
Matachin recovering from the fever, he was roused by someone shouting
outside 'the coolies are
hanging themselves in the trees and falling on their machetes, some are
paying the Malays to shoot them and chop off their heads!’ On
investigation Totten discovered that the opium supply which had run out
two weeks before had not been re-stocked because orders
had been received forbidding the commissary to order the drug. After
being deprived of opium, acute melancholia had struck the Chinese, Their
work gradually had slowed to a halt and that morning mass suicides had
begun. Totten wrote later, “Some anonymous, grubby, ink-stained
bookkeeper in New York who did not know a spiking maul from a fielding
pin, who had a head full of trash instead of brains had decided to
institute certain economies which had fatal results.” Totten’s
investigation showed that the coolies’ depression over the deaths of a
number of their group from fever had been deepened by withdrawal from
the drug to the extent that they chose suicide as the only escape from
the hell of their existence on the Isthmus.
Rather than be responsible
for the deaths of the rest of the coolies, Totten ordered the captain of
the Gorgona to get up steam and pick up those sitting in the water and
take them forcibly to Jamaica and turn them over to the Chinese
colony on the island, where he is quoted as saying "I hoped and prayed they could obtain their
drug.” This ended the widespread use of Chinese workers on the railroad
construction. However, Chinese influence is obvious in Panama. Today in
Colon and Panama City many houses offer glimpses of the Far East:
balconies decked with screens showing gaudy dragons, and gay paper
lanterns swinging in the breeze.
INAUGURATION OF THE PANAMA RAILROAD
The
Panama Railway was inaugurated in 1856. The project was an engineering
marvel of its age, carried out in brutally difficult conditions. Although there is no way of knowing the exact number of workers who died
during construction, estimates range from 6,000 to as high as 12,000
killed, many of them from cholera and malaria. Until the opening of the
Panama Canal, the railway carried the heaviest volume of freight per
unit length of any railroad in the world.
 The existence of the
railway was key in the selection of Panama as the site of the canal.
The railway greatly assisted in the building of Panama Canal, which
closely paralleled and in some places took over the rail line. Parts of
the rail route were moved during the building of the canal, and
considerable additions were made to the rail system.
The railroad also created
a new city and port at the Atlantic terminus of the line. The town that
immediately sprang up to accommodate the railroad offices, warehouses,
docks, and shops and to lodge both railroad workers and passengers soon
became, and remains, the second largest in the country.
United States citizens
named it Aspinwall, after William H. Aspinwall, one of the founders of the Panama Railroad
Company, but the Panamanians christened it Colón, in honor of Columbus.
Both names were used for many years, but because the Panamanians
insisted that no such place as Aspinwall existed and refused to deliver
mail so addressed, the name Colón prevailed.
It would be difficult to
over-emphasise the historic and economic importance of the Panama
Railroad to the Americas and to the world, for its history is the
history of a realised dream of thinking men who for centuries had
recognised the importance of a free inter-oceanic communication at the
narrow strip of land known as the Isthmus of Panama.
Its early
beginnings antedated those of North America many years and these
successful efforts were but a renewal of many previous attempts to
construct a rail and water communication between the Atlantic seaboard
and the Pacific Ocean. For its time the completion of the Panama
Railroad was an engineering feat that had hitherto only been dreamed of.
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