The Boston Tea Party and Castors

Boston, the happy little town in Massachusetts, was home of the infamous Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773.  It’s fair to say that the colonists weren’t so happy on that day when they unloaded all of the tea they could find on the ships into the Boston Harbor.  The British government, along with the East India Company, controlled all of the tea that came into the colonies at the time and were taxing the tea that came into the country.  If Castors were around back then, this task would have been much easier for them to accomplish.

The Boston Tea Party was a major event that impacted the American Revolution.  Instead of returning the tea to Britain, like many of the other colonies had done, Boston planned to keep the tea until the colonists decided to simply deal with the new tariffs put on it due to the Tax Act of 1773.  Boston colonists, on the other hand, simply refused.  They threw the tea into the harbor, by hand, which destroyed it entirely.  If they had had a pulley system and Castors, they wouldn’t have had to exert nearly as much energy during this historic protest.

In September and October of 1773, there were seven ships deployed by the East India Company for the United States.  Three of those ships were en route to Boston alone and all of the ships were carrying more than 2,000 chests containing nearly 600,000 pounds of tea.  That is approximately 300 pounds per chest! A castor system would have been easy to setup and would have easily cut the time required to throw all the tea into the harbor in half.

It took 30 to 130 men, some disguised as Indians, nearly three hours to unload the 342 chests of tea into the harbor.  At 300 pounds per chest, and lacking the innovation of castors up until this point, that is 102,600 pounds of lifting and heaving chests into the Boston Harbor in three hours.  Just imagine how your back would feel if you were to reenact The Boston Tea Party today.  That would be one excruciating chiropractor bill the next day.  It’s clear to see how much easier this protest would have been if modernization would have come much sooner.

The Boston Tea Party is known as such a historic event because it was one of the first major protests by the colonists that inhabited the early United States.  Not only that, it influenced other major protests that came in later years.  Many of those protests also suffered from not having Castors, as well.  A few of Gandhi’s protests were later compared to The Boston Tea Party.  Also a protest against major oil companies about the oil crisis consisted of protestors boarding ships in the Boston Harbor, on the 200th anniversary of The Boston Tea Party, and unloading a number of empty oil drums into the harbor.  Even in 1973, people wern’t taking advantage of the ease those castors would offer for unloading things from a cargo ship!