This is the earliest known survivor of an integrated cotton ginning system widely used to process cotton from wagon to bale in a continuous operation. The gin machinery was designed and built in 1914 by the Lummus Cotton Gin Company. It can process seven bales per hour. Five gin stands, stick machine, burr machine, separators, cleaners, press pump, and pneumatic conveying fans are driven by a 125-hp Bessemer oil engine. This gin ran commercially until 1974 and was restored to operating condition in 1993.
Mechanical
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Flickr/John W. Schulze (CC BY 2.0)
Image Caption:
Burton Farmers Gin Mill
Era_date_from:
1914
1994
During the post-Civil War era, efforts to cultivate the land for higher crop yields resulted in the digging of thousands of miles of ditches to improve land drainage. Accurately graded ditches were needed for open drainage, pipeline trenches and placement of underground agricultural drainage tile. Teams of skilled workers laid out the direction and gradient of a ditch and dug it out with pick and shovel. The Black Swamp area, where Lake Erie drains into northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan, was the center of much of the U.S. ditching activity.
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Image Credit:
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Buckeye Steam Traction Ditcher
Era_date_from:
1902
1988
This collection recognizes the inventive talents of John Moses Browning (1855-1926), a prolific and significant designer of sporting and military firearms, whose designs were known for simplicity, accuracy, and reliability. He held more than 128 patents covering 80 distinct firearms produced by Winchester, Remington, Colt, Fabrique Nationale, Savage, and General Motors (during wartime), among others.
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Image Credit:
Public Domain; Produced prior to 1/1/1923
Image Caption:
Browning Firearms Collection
Era_date_from:
1878
1989
Founded by Eleuthère Irénéé du Pont (1771-1834), the Brandywine River Mills became the largest maker of explosive black powder in the United States. That success resulted directly from the firm's pioneering use of gunpowder processing machinery driven by water wheels and water turbines.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Flickr/Harvey Barrison (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Image Caption:
On of the waterwheels belonging to the Brandywine River Powder Mills
Era_date_from:
1803
2002
These two water turbines were probably the largest and nearly the most powerful ever built in the United States, supplying direct mechanical power to a manufacturing plant. Their installation between 1871 and 1873 makes them among the oldest surviving water turbines.
A dam at Cohoes diverted water to mills and factories along a power canal system. The vertical-shaft turbines at the mill were said to run at 800 horsepower (600 kilowatt) under a head of 20 feet and were connected to an overhead shaft by bevel gearing.
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Image Credit:
Public Domain; Produced prior to 1/1/1923
Image Caption:
An 1879 sketch of the Boyden Hydraulic Turbine, drawn by James Emerson for his book "Treatise relative to the testing of water-wheels and machinery"
Era_date_from:
1871
1975
This is the first commercial, human-blood heat exchanger. Developed in 1957, it permitted a patient's body temperature to be safely and rapidly lowered during open heart surgery to any desired and precisely controlled hypothermic level, then during the conclusion of the operation rapidly rewarmed to normal. Prior to this, hypothermic surgery required hours of preoperative, hard-to-control, external emersion cooling and postoperative rewarming.
Its design was a cooperative development between researchers at the Duke University Medical Center led by Dr. Ivan W.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy ASME
Image Caption:
A disassembly of the Blood Heat Exchanger
Era_date_from:
1957
1980
The ballpoint pen invented by Ladislao Jose Biro was originally patented in Hungary in 1938. The principle of the ballpoint pen was originally patented by John Loud in 1888 for a product to mark leather and in 1916 by Van Vechten Riesberg, but neither of these products were exploited commercially.
As a journalist, Biro was inspired by the concept of quick-drying ink in a print shop.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Wikipedia/(CC BY-SA 2.5)
Image Caption:
A 1945 Birome Ballpoint Pen advertisement in an Argentine magazine known as Leoplán
Era_date_from:
1938
2005
When built in 1962, this shovel was the second largest in the world. It was used for the removal of overburden in the surface mining of thin coal seams. In its lifetime, it recovered nine million tons of bituminous coal from depths of 20 to 50 feet for local electric power generation. Standing 160-feet high, weighing 5,500 tons, and moving at speeds up to two-tenths of a mile per hour, the machine stripped about a square mile each year.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Flickr/KellyK (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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This picture of the Big Brutus Mine Shovel does not fully capture its immensity. To create a comparison, the average person would be slightly shorter than the treads, near the bottom.
Era_date_from:
1962
1987
This unit, retired from the Belle Isle Station of the Oklahoma Gas & Electric Company, was the first gas turbine to be used for electric utility power generation in the United States. It represents the transformation of the early aircraft gas turbine, in which the engines seldom ran more than ten hours at a stretch, into a long-life prime mover. This redesign was based upon creep-rupture tests of S-816 cobalt-base alloys for turbine buckets. The low-cost trouble-free service led to wide-scale adoption of the gas turbine, over 45 million kilowatt capacity (over 9 percent of U.S.
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Image Credit:
Image Courtesy of ASME
Image Caption:
Belle Isle Gas Turbine on static display in Schenectady, New York
Era_date_from:
1949
1984
Built by the Bay City Dredge Works of Bay City, Michigan, this dredge was used to construct a portion of US 41 called the Tamiami Trail, which connected Tampa with Miami through the Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp. The last remaining display of walking dredges (of some 145 walking machines), it has a unique propulsion design enabling the dredge to cope with drainage problems in a wetlands environment.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Wikipedia/Ebyabe (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Image Caption:
The Bay City Walking Dredge as it sits in Collier-Seminole State Park
Era_date_from:
1924
1994
Innovations
