When Ford Motor Company introduced its new Model T on October 1, 1908, even an inveterate optimist like Henry Ford (1863-1947) could not predict the vast changes that his rather homely new vehicle would produce. What flowed from this series of bold innovations was more than an endless stream of Model Ts — it was the very foundation of the twentieth century itself. The assembly line became the century's characteristic production mode, eventually applied to everything from phonographs to hamburgers.
Mechanical
DearbornState: MICountry: USAWebsite: https://www.asme.org/about-asme/who-we-are/engineering-history/landmarks/233-model-tCreator: Ford Motor Company, Wills, Childe
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Don O'Brien (CC BY 2.0)Image Caption: Model TEra_date_from: 1908
2005
This pump, designed by Edwin Reynolds (1831-1909) and built by the Edward P. Allis company, is the major component of one of the earliest water-pollution control systems. It was capable of pumping more than a half billion gallons of water a day, the highest-capacity pump in the world when installed. It still is used during the summer to pump water from Lake Michigan into the Milwaukee River upstream of the downtown area. This maintains a current in the lower portion of the river and greatly reduces the concentration of pollutants.
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Image Caption: Milwaukee River Flushing StationEra_date_from: 1888
1992
The Old Mill, a smock type of windmill, believed to be the oldest operating windmill in the United States. Most of its parts are original. This mill is the sole survivor of four that once stood along the range of hills west of the town of Nantucket. The long spar and wheel rotate the top of the mill and turn the sails into the wind. Inside, visitors can watch the gears as corn is ground into meal, producing about 5 bushels an hour. Documentation of the restoration of the windmill is located at the Nantucket Historical Association's Research Center.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Hiroshi Okugawa (CC BY 2.0)Image Caption: Old Mill in NantucketEra_date_from: 1746
1992
Designed and constructed in the early 1940s, this laboratory has an unequalled capacity to simulate a wide range of climatic conditions from arctic cold to jungle moisture. Data from tests of some three hundred different aircraft and over two thousand items of equipment has provided information vital to the performance, safety, and reliability of aircraft operating in extremes of weather.
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Image Credit: Public Domain (United States Air Force)Image Caption: McKinley Climatic LaboratoryEra_date_from: 1944
1987
The Belle of Louisville, built in 1914, is the oldest operating “western rivers” steamboat. It has the shallow-draft flat-bottom hull braced by hog-chain trusses, multiple fire-tube boilers, paddlewheel propulsion, and superstructure configuration that were characteristic of hundreds of steamboats that plied America’s rivers during the 19th and 20th centuries
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Bailey Visual Life (CC BY 2.0)Image Caption: Belle of Louisville, still in operationEra_date_from: 1914
2010
At the mountain where the Civil War's Battle Above the Clouds was waged, tourist business has thrived from the building of its first toll road (Whiteside Pike) in 1857 to present day.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Duane Tate (CC BY 2.0)Image Caption: Lookout Mountain Incline RailwayEra_date_from: 1895
1991
This steam crawler-tractor emancipated horses from the killing work of hauling trains of sleds over iced roads in the winter woods of the United States and Canada.
Designed, patented (1901), and built by Alvin C. Lombard (1856-1937) of Waterville, Maine, eighty-three "Lombards" were the first practical examples of the often-tried lag or crawler tread that would become the mark of the internal combustion engine-driven agricultural and construction equipment and military tank in current use.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/cliff1066,Image Caption: Lombard Steam Log HaulerEra_date_from: 1910
1982
This machine is an unusual triple-expansion, three-crank rocker engine, which in its day was a high-capacity unit providing outstanding performance for the Boston Water Works Corporation. Designed by Erasmus Darwin Leavitt, Jr. (1836-1916), Engine No. 3 was installed in 1894 to a high-service pumping facility on the south side of the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Brighton.
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Image Credit: Public Domain (National Park Service)Image Caption: Leavitt-Riedler Pumping EngineEra_date_from: 1894
1973
The La Esperanza sugar mill steam engine is one of the few remaining American links to the pioneer beam engines of the English inventors Thomas Newcomen (1712) and James Watt (1769). The engine was built in 1861 in Cold Spring, New York, by the West Point Foundry. The general arrangement and details, including the Gothic embellishment, are typical of machinery of the period. The straight-line motion of the piston rod is accommodated to the arc of the moving beam end by a parallel motion. Watt regarded this ingenious linkage as the invention of which he was most proud.
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Image Credit: Public Domain (National Park Service)Image Caption: Hacienda La Esperanza Sugar Mill Steam EngineEra_date_from: 1861
1979
This is one of the earliest US foundry-machine shops remaining in operation and one of the few water powered. It was founded by Samuel N. Knight (1838-1913) to manufacture machinery for the gold mines of the Mother Lode region. Knight was one of several inventors experimenting with impulse turbines to exploit the area's abundant high-head water power for driving hoists, ore stamps, and other mining machinery.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Wikipedia/Bobak Ha'Eri (CC BY 3.0)Image Caption: Knight Foundry and Machine ShopEra_date_from: 1873
1995
Innovations
Installed alongside an Epping Carpenter pump that was later scrapped, this water pump was built by Allis-Chalmers, which for many years had Edwin Reynolds as its chief engineer. Driven by a Corliss steam engine, these large city water pumps were installed in Jacksonville's water supply…
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Beginning with the blacksmith shop of German immigrant Meinrad Rumely (1823-1904), this successive family of firms invented and produced a line of agricultural equipment that played a vital role in the evolution of farming based on the muscle of humans and animals to one based on the power of…
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This silver mine preserves two features of bygone practice. One is the reversible waterwheel of the ore-hoist, which originally was installed in 1565 and currently dates back to 1824. The present wheel is 9 meters in diameter and reaches a depth of 700 meters.
Second, the man engine of…
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The first commercial central electric-generating station in the United States to use nuclear energy was the Shippingport Atomic Power Station of the Department of Energy and the Duquesne Light Company. In a dramatic high-tech display, ground was broken in 1954 during dedication ceremonies by…
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Siegfried Marcus (1833-1898), a remarkable engineer and manufacturer, lived most of his life and died in Vienna, leaving his most important legacy — an experimental automobile resembling today's modern car and the oldest extant automobile known worldwide. Marcus' second car, built circa 1875 (a…
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The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was renamed in 2009 to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Notable for: unique electromechanical devices and systems in the longest accelerator in the world
The Stanford two-mile accelerator, the longest in the world,…
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This highly diverse facility has pioneered the development of solar energy applications worldwide. The Solar Energy and Energy Conversion Laboratory (SEECL) was unique in developing practical solar energy devices based on established principles of thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid…
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George Washington's concern over standardization of rifles for the Continental Army led to the formation of national armory and to his selection of Springfield as its site. Completed in 1794, it was the first national armory in the United States. Like the Robbins and Lawrence Armory, the…
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The innovative SS Great Britain, launched in 1843, was the first iron-hulled, screw-propelled ship to cross any ocean and led mercantile history into British domination in the late nineteenth century. Standard practice of naval and merchant ship construction derived from this ship. The…
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The SS Jeremiah O'Brien, an emergency cargo vessel of the type EC2-S-C1 better known as Liberty Ships, is one of two operative survivors of 2,751 ships, the largest fleet of single class ever built. The other is the SS John W. Brown, now in Baltimore (not operative at the time of the landmark…
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The two 3,500-hp steeple compound Unaflow steam engines powering the S.S. Badger represent one of the last types of reciprocating marine steam engines. Built by the Skinner Engine Company, most Unaflow engines are single expansion. These feature tandem high- and low-pressure cylinders separated…
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The St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Line is the oldest surviving interurban-urban passenger rail transportation system in the United States. Originally incorporated as the New Orleans Carrollton Rail Road in 1833, service began in 1835. A variety of motive power had been used including horses,…
Read Morehe Automatic Temperature Control System was named as a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 2008. Warren S. Johnson came up with the idea for automatic temperature control while teaching at Normal School in Whitewater, Wisconsin in the 1880's. Originally, janitors would have to enter each…
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In 1964, Shinkansen (which means "new trunk line" and is also known as the bullet train) between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka became the world's first high-speed railway system, running at a maximum business speed of over 200 km/h (130-160 mph).
The nose profile, starting with the original…
The Turbinia was the world's first turbine-driven ship. It attracted worldwide attention at the 1897 Spithead Naval Review by traveling more than 34 knots. This remarkable performance accelerated the acceptance of the steam turbine as an alternative to the steam reciprocating engine on ships as…
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The USS Albacore (AGSS-569) represented a radical change in submarine design. The hull was designed with underwater speed as the prime requirement, and it was built with newly developed high-strength steel (HY-80). In addition to these two major innovations, the Albacore served as a…
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The Cairo is the sole survivor of the fleet of river gunboats built by the Union during the Civil War with the object of controlling the lower Mississippi River. Designed by Samuel Pook and built by James B. Eads, it saw limited battle and was sunk on the Yazoo River in 1862 by newly developed…
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The Voyager explorers, which provided scientists and the world with the first detailed pictures of faraway planets, were designed and tested during 1972 to 1977. The two most intelligent machines ever built in the NASA space program, the explorers were launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1977…
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The Watkins Woolen Mill is among the best preserved examples of a Midwest woolen mill in nineteenth-century United States. Its machinery for preparing, spinning, and weaving wool reflects the existence of well-established textile industry in the country. It was designed and built by Waltus L.…
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The history of this foundry, which was the oldest malleable iron company in continuous operation in the United States for many years, was inseparable from that of the small town of Westmoreland, where neighbors and workers kept time by the foundry bell. The firm was founded as Oakhill Malleable…
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