The first steam-powered pile driver in the United States is believed to have been a direct-acting type patented in 1841 and used in construction of Drydock No. 1 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Virtually unchanged since the latter half of the nineteenth century, steam pile drivers play a crucial role in the construction of piers, bulkheads, bridges, and numerous other in-water construction projects such as lighthouses.
Their hulls are basically rectangular scows. The guides for the weight employed to drive the piles are supported on a tall timber famework, the distinct and defining characteristic of this vessel type.
When they were operated by steam, the steam winch, for hoisting the weight, and the steam boiler were located in a wooden deck house or cabin. The boiler was the vertical type, using oil for fuel, the stack projecting through the deck house roof. In the nineteenth century, coal probably fueled the boiler.
There is little wasted space on the vessel. The open decks around the house are wide enough only for the walkways and for handling mooring lines. There are winch heads on the outside of the house used by the pile driver to winch itself into position.
Although today the majority of extant pile drivers are steel-hulled and diesel-powered, steam is still employed for driving piles.
Dredges
One of the earliest accounts of dredging in the present-clay United States refers to attempts by the French in the eighteenth century to deepen the mouth of the Mississippi River.
In 1718, the Company of the Indies, the French enterprise then in control of the Colony of Louisiana, sent several iron harrows from France. These were dragged across river bars to help remove them. These harrows were unloaded and lost in Mobile and the plan was never implemented.
Several years later, in 1729, a scraper or harrow-like implement was finally built and dragged across the bar at Belize Pass, successfully deepening the channel by loosening the sediment and allowing it to be carried away by the current.
In Philadelphia in the 1770s, a grab dredge, consisting of two moveable jaws or shovels, was used to clear slips, and in 1784 a man-powered treadmill machine fitted with dippers was used to remove sediment. By the end of the eighteenth century other similar types of crude dredging devices were in use in North America.
In the early nineteenth century, improvements began to appear in dredging technology, and several patents were issued for mechanical dredging machines. Among the earliest was one issued in 1804 to Oliver Evans of Philadelphia for his machine called the Orukter Amphibulos.
Apparently the first self-propelled, wheeled vehicle in America, the Amphibulos was described as a “large flat, or scow, with a steam engine of the power of five horses on board to work machinery to raise the mud into flats.”
Little is known about the machine, but Oliver Evans himself became one of the most important figures in the development of steam engine technology and steam navigation in the United States.
With the continued development of steam power, a variety of technological improvements in dredging machines appeared. However, the real impetus to dredging and the corresponding advancements in dredging machines in the United States resulted from the passage of the General Survey Act of 1824 and the fact that the Army Engineers were given the responsibility for its implementation.
Under the authority of the Act, the Engineers began to acquire, develop and build dredges for use on a variety of harbor and inland river projects, where previously they had resorted to perpendicular dykes to control the flow of water and increase the movement of sediments.
In 1826 the Albany Argus reported: “The person who directed the operations of the dredging machine at the Overslaugh [a shallow point in the Hudson River], during the last season, has, within a few days, taken the soundings of the channel on which he operated and he finds a depth of from ten to twelve feet water; while on the adjacent bottom not excavated, there is from 5 to 7 feet only.”
John Grant of Baltimore built a steam-powered ladder bucket dredge for the Army Engineers in 1827 for use at Sackets Harbor, New York. An 1830s ladder bucket dredge, although employed at Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, is thought to be similar to the one employed in New York.
By the early 1900s, the bucket and hydraulic cutter head dredges were the most common and extensively employed types in the dredging of harbors and navigation channels. The bucket dredge, historically related to the spoon dredge, a simple scoop design, typically had a boom extending from its bow.
The boom was supported by an A-frame or an H or gallows-type frame. Another boom, equipped with a large bucket at its pivot encl, rested near the midpoint of the first boom. The first boom had a cable running through a sheaf at the head of the first boom. At the head of this boom was a bucket used as a scoop.
The cutter head dredge differed from the bucket dredge in that it suctioned sediments through a pipe, the sediments having been loosened or cut by the cutter head. The boom was usually lowered by a lift rig supported by an A-frame.
The hollow boom contained a pipe leading to a large hydraulic suction pump. A rotating cutter head, complete with a series of blades, was attached to the end of the boom. The bottom sediment was then pumped into a waiting scow barge or through a floating pipeline to shore by a series of connected pipes.
In 1912, International Marine Engineering published data on a 20-inch Morris hydraulic suction cutter head dredge owned by the American Pipe and Construction Company used on the New York State Canal Barge system.
The hull was wooden, with two heavy steel girders running fore and aft. Powered by a triple-expansion Morris engine (750 hp @ 225 revolutions/minute), the main hydraulic dredge pump, steel constructed, had a 20-inch diameter suction/discharge.
The power plants utilized a surface condenser, with vertical air pumps and centrifugal circulating pumps, boiler feed pumps, and service pumps. The cutter shaft measured 8.5 inches in diameter. The cutter-drive engine (12-by-12-inch double-cylinder horizontal engine) sat on deck.
Hydraulic dredges used early this century worked extensively during construction of the New York State Barge Canal System. Stationary vessels, these dredges had no propulsion systems; they reached their destinations by tugboat.
Many dredges used vertical timbers termed “spuds” to anchor themselves in place. Raised and lowered by winches, the spud legs traveled through vertical guides called spud boxes that were built through or on the exterior of the hull.
This essay is excerpted with minor editing for clarification from Target Investigations in Connection with the New York and New Jersey harbor Navigation Project, May 2004, prepared for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District, by Andrew D.W. Lydecker and Stephen R. James, Jr. of Panamerican Consultants, Inc.
Illustrations, from above: Brooklyn Navy Yard Drydock No 1 construction, 1847; Scale model of a 19th century pile driver; Orukter Amphibulos, steam powered mechanical dredge, built in Philadelphia in 1804; and the dredge W.A. Thompson, built in Pittsburgh in 1937.
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