The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 1841–1846
Dart's steam grain elevator lifted grain from boat to bins, making Buffalo the grain port.
Dockworkers moved 2,000 bushels a day; Dart built a marine leg that drops into the hold, raises grain to tall bins and feeds it to a canal boat.
Joseph Dart
the move
Grain from the western prairies reached Lake Erie at Buffalo, where it had to move from lake boats onto canal boats bound for the East. Workers cupped grain into buckets and carried it on their backs, and no more than about 2,000 bushels a day could be cleared from a hold.
Joseph Dart had seen Oliver Evans' conveyor belt used in an automated flour mill and wondered why the same idea could not unload and store grain. With engineer Robert Dunbar he built a steam-powered bucket elevator, and in 1842 the first grain transfer and storage elevator stood on the Buffalo waterfront.
A marine leg could be lowered into a ship's hold on a cradle of ropes and pulleys, powered by the same steam engine as the conveyor, so grain rose straight to the top of the storage bins without being handled at the wharf. Grain was then drawn off the bottom, weighed and run down into a waiting canal barge.
The elevator had a capacity of roughly 55,000 bushels, and the first ship unloaded through it was out of the harbour before dark. The shift from men on ladders to a mechanised system turned the grain trade around and made Buffalo the world's largest grain port.
why it works
- Raising grain directly from hold to bins removes the wharf-level handling that had to be done by hand.
- Storage in tall bins plus gravity discharge means the transfer point turns over far more grain per day.
- Using the ship's cargo weight and a single steam engine, one machine does the work of many dockworkers.
what transfers
Find the single point where goods pile up and attach a machine there, rather than hiring more hands at the same chokepoint.
what came after
Within fifteen years there were about ten grain elevators near Buffalo Harbour with 1.5 million bushels of capacity, and Buffalo had overtaken Odessa, London and Rotterdam as the largest grain port. The grain elevator became the prototype of the modern storage warehouse and the mechanised intermodal transfer, and its marine leg was copied around the world.
references
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