Bucyrus International
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| Subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. | |
| Industry | Machinery manufacturing |
| Fate | Purchased by Caterpillar Inc. |
| Predecessor |
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| Founded | Bucyrus, Ohio, United States (1880) |
| Founder | Daniel P. Eells et al. |
| Defunct | July 2011 |
| Headquarters | South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Products |
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| Services | Maintenance |
| Website | www |
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Footnotes / references |
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Bucyrus-Erie was an American surface and underground mining equipment company. It was founded as Bucyrus Foundry and Manufacturing Company in Bucyrus, Ohio in 1880. Bucyrus moved its headquarters to South Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1893. In 1927, Bucyrus merged with the Erie Steam Shovel Company to form Bucyrus-Erie.
Renamed Bucyrus International, Inc. in 1997, it was purchased by Caterpillar Inc. in a US$8.8 billion transaction that closed on July 8, 2011. At the time of its acquisition, the Bucyrus product line included a range of material removal and material handling products used in both surface and underground mining.
Bucyrus was an early producer of steam shovels, operating from its Bucyrus, Ohio headquarters and manufacturing facility. In 1893, Bucyrus moved its operations to South Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In 1904 Bucyrus supplied 77 of the 102 steam shovels used to dig the Panama Canal. These were ninety-five-ton models with five-cubic-yard buckets that could move approximately eight tons of material at once. They were operated by a crew of four. Similar to a locomotive, the crew was headed by a engineer, and included two firemen who stoked the boiler with coal, and a craneman. A support crew on the ground of six men extended the rails on which the shovel moved as the digging progressed. A famous photograph of President Theodore Roosevelt was taken in November 1906 operating a Bucyrus shovel in Panama during his inspection trip to the canal. In March 1910, a single Bucyrus shovel excavated 70,000 cubic yards over twenty-six consecutive days at the Culebra cut, setting a canal construction record. Each shovel averaged more than 1,000,000 cubic yards of earth excavated at the cut.
The company changed its name to Bucyrus-Erie in 1927 when it merged with the Erie Steam Shovel Company, the country's leading manufacturer of small excavators at that time.
In 1930 Bucyrus joined with the English firm of Ruston & Hornsby Ltd Lincoln, England, to form the Ruston-Bucyrus Ltd firm in England. Ruston & Hornsby Ltd were the pre-eminent manufacturers of steam excavators at the time, having started in 1874; the merger gave the company access to previously unavailable world markets.
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Wikipedia