The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 1898–1970
Hulett's ore unloader scooped ships empty and made Great Lakes steel cheap
George Hulett's 1898 unloader cut ore unloading from a week of shoveling to hours, dropping handling cost below five cents a ton.
Hulett unloaders
the move
Iron ore from Michigan's Upper Peninsula reached the Lake Erie docks in the 1850s, but unloading was brutal: men with shovels and wheelbarrows took about a week to empty a 300-ton ship. Steam hoists and the 1880s Brownhoist with its 1.5-ton grab bucket helped, yet men still had to shovel ore into the buckets inside the hold.
George Hulett, a Cleveland engineer, patented his unloader in 1898 and installed the first in his hometown of Conneaut, Ohio in 1899. Its bucket — 10 tons on the first steam-powered generation, 17 tons on the electric 1912 models — reached into the ship and lifted ore straight into railcars. The price of handling ore dropped below five cents a ton, and by 1913 Hulett unloaders were in use at almost every port on Lake Erie.
why it works
- The machine's bucket reached into the hold, removing men from the bottleneck.
- Bigger bites (10 to 17 tons) outpaced every earlier grab bucket.
- Electric second-generation units were faster and cheaper to run.
- Cheap unloading made Great Lakes ore viable for the steel industry.
what transfers
When labor is the bottleneck, redesign the interface — machinery that reaches the load itself beats more workers at the same tool.
what came after
Hulett unloaders worked the Great Lakes for almost a century until self-unloading freighters appeared in the late 1970s. They were so central to the system that ships were designed around them, and the surviving machines on Cleveland's Whiskey Island received historic designation before most were dismantled.
references
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.