Mobile Crane

Since man mechanised himself for good in the early 20th century, everything has changed sizes.  The motorised power of the wheel shortened distances; then it shortened time between distances; and, finally, it shrunk the amount of effort needed to haul stuff over those distances.  It increased the amount of work a single person could accomplish in one day.  It provided a fulcrum for pulling weights that would previously have taken years to move.  Now, it offers a platform for an even bigger fulcrum (and one of the oldest pieces of mechanisation in the business) – the mobile crane.

Cranes have been around since at least the time of Homer (Odyssey, not Simpsons):  bracket marks for fixed cranes have been discovered on Greek excavation sites dating from as early as 515 BC.  The mobile crane came in somewhat later – a lever and puller arrangement with a swinging boom arm mounted on a wheeled platform.  The platform is now a multi-axle all wheel drive monster truck, and the swinging arm a fully telescopic, quick-assemble unit capable of lifting thousands of tons, but the principle is the same.  Move the crane to the job and the job can be completed anywhere.

What the mobile crane did (and does) was, and is, this:  it removed almost all restrictions from people in terms of where and how they build, barring the physical restriction of manoeuvrability for the crane itself.  Prior to the mobile crane, any building project required enough space to assemble, erect and fix a static crane.  After the advent of the mobile crane, the space needed just to put lifting gear together was no longer required – building could take place anywhere there was room enough to drive a mobile crane in and secure it.

In the modern world, the mobile crane is super-flexible, immensely strong and extremely quick to place and set up.  With several turning axles enabling even the largest mobile crane (at the top end of the scale, a big mobile crane can hoist weights comparable to an average tower crane) to park up in the smallest places, nothing is impossible anymore.  A big mobile crane can be in place and ready to lift in a couple of hours, allowing construction firms to undertake projects in previously impossible areas and come out on top of the budget.

City building, in particular, would be virtually impossible without the modern mobile crane:  a modern mobile crane can be driven into a single street and set up for lifting, which removes the need to close off whole networks of streets to accommodate an unwieldy static crane.