Wisconsin Stories is a partnership of the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Television.
At Bussirus International in South Milwaukee, they
make some really big stuff.
Giant gears and other big parts will be assembled into
shovels, drag lines and drill rigs for the mining industry.
Craft workers from the Steelworkers Union create
each part for the huge custom built machines.
Metal on the big parts is carefully measured
and shaved down to meet exacting specifications,
with some parts requiring accuracy within the
width of a human hair.
This company is part of Wisconsin's long history of
making heavy machinery for use in other industries.
So tonight on Wisconsin Stories, we're going to take a look
at the kind of big ticket items that you don't find in
your local hardware store.
And not your average big stuff, but something that's
made for a really big idea.
The kind of machines that are designed from the ground
up for one really huge job.
And made with pride by skilled craft workers who create
these pieces one at a time.
Right here, tonight on Wisconsin Stories.
[Music]
Major funding for Wisconsin Stories is provided by
the MeadWitter Foundation Incorporated, Wisconsin
Rapids, Wisconsin.
Additional funding is provided by the Halbert and Alice
Kadesh Foundation, Philip J.
and Elizabeth B.
Hendrickson, and an advised fund of
the Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin.
We're standing in front of the offices at ViewSyra's
International. That's a six story office building.
On this diagram, we'd be right down here.
And this is a drag line made in the plant right
behind this office building.
That's a really huge machine.
And making huge stuff creates huge challenges involving highly
skilled workers who handcraft a machine piece by piece.
And there's a special pride that comes with working
on the really big stuff.
When the ViewSyra steam shovel and dredge company moved
to South Milwaukee in 1893, it brought with it a
strong reputation for building specialized
excavation equipment.
So it was no surprise that in 1905, ViewSyra steam shovels
were chosen to take on the huge job of digging the Panama Canal,
which meant moving an estimated 225 million
cubic yards of earth.
When President Theodore Roosevelt inspected
the site in 1908, he posed on board a 95
ton, ViewSyra's shovel.
By the time ViewSyra bought the Erie steam shovel
company in 1927 and became known as ViewSyra's Erie,
its equipment was being used in other big
projects around the world.
As time went on, shovels were mounted on tracks,
power changed from steam to gasoline, then to
diesel and electricity.
And as the jobs got larger, so did the machines,
with buyers demanding bigger and bigger models.
ViewSyra's international biggest shovels and drag
lines are still made in the company's South Milwaukee plant.
At the South Milwaukee Community Center, formerly
a club for ViewSyra's employees, I met with some
retired ViewSyra's workers.
When you first walked in to be Cyrus, how did it feel?
Big, really big.
What were the thoughts I went through your mind?
When I first was hired as a machinist, I said, "Man,
alive, alive, we'll be able to operate these things."
There's no comparison of different machine tools.
This is still really different than, say, car manufacturing.
Yeah, oh yeah, that's the same thing.
There's an evidence assembly line.
There might have been a dozen machines being made at one time.
There were parts for all of them laying on the machine
shop floor or dollar and directing floor at that time.
You assembled the whole machine on a small one.
On a larger one do you assemble them in sections?
Or, in sections are tested and shipped out to the field.
And there they are assembled.
They cannot build them up here, they're too large.
For sheer size, as well as creative design, the 4250 W.
Walking Drag Line is another significant example of
ViewSyra's eerie capability.
Do you remember the 4250, the big muskie, which
is now served its time?
It's down, it's finished.
That was 330 rail cars, I believe, that from here over to
Katas, Ohio in the early 60s.
300 rail cars, 300 plus rail cars took it over.
Big Muskie was a walking drag line that was purchased by
the coal company in Ohio.
Do mine coal for electricity.
At the time it was decided shall we buy two machines
at 110 cubic yards each or one at 220 cubic yards each.
It was decided for one machine at 220 cubic yards.
And to date that has been, it's not existing anymore,
the largest mobile land machine in the world.
Now that's big drag line, how long did that take to make?
I'd say over a couple of years it took a year to
erect it in the field alone.
One year, just put it together.
The best part of a year to put it together.
You could easily have one end of the football field
and dump it at the other end of the football field.
No problem.
So Edler-Veterrudi thought there he would dig at the
goalpost of one football field sitting at the other end of
that field and swing around and dump it at the goalpost
of another football field.
That's 600 feet away.
That's the extent.
Now these are big pieces that you're working.
Some of them are big pieces.
Right, and some are small.
But you had to make them really accurately.
Right, because you had to inspect it and check them.
Most of us, plus one or minus one, but then we
got some type of bearings within 7/10 of 1/1000.
7/10 of 1/1000 of what?
what? Of a thousand.
Of an inch.
That's that's mighty small.
No you can't.
You've got seven cents you can't even see, are
you? I heard um, chat call.
What you made the Cadillac of the industry.
Well definitely.
Lake and Continental, the whole work.
How good are these machines?
I think at the time they were.
They probably were the best- The old themselves didn't feel.
Yep. They played that by the customer themselves because
that's why they bought so many of them.
The competition for the big ones wasn't there until
years later that other people caught up with the
engineering and know how to be able to do that.
So it was always known as the Cadillac of the industry and
it was also known as Bissar Street was the bread and
butter of our community.
So it's about the way it was.
Wisconsin industry has long been involved in
making big stuff.
The large parts, heavy equipment,
gears and machinery that help build American industry.
In this cramped storefront, Henry Harnishfager and
partner Alonzo Pauling worked to make a better overhead
factory crane, one that used electric motors in
place of ropes and pulleys.
Moving big stuff was becoming more and more
essential to the many factories popping up around Milwaukee.
Originally delivered by Horsewagon, these
Harnishfager cranes delivered the horse power to do the
heavy lifting of many growing industries.
Mel Anderson operated Harnishfager
cranes here at AOS Smith for more than 25 years.
What's it like to operate a bridge crane?
It's a teacher's job.
It's a job that you got to be careful.
You got to be at your own best in judging and
safety. Sometimes you're working with men below.
Oh yeah, always working with
men below.
What were your loads?
Well, it was mostly pipe, gas line water pipe,
small pipe to be pipe and steel like the frame,
automobiles be a frame from the start to the
finish. Did this pipe ever swing?
I mean, well that's the operators.
That's the operator job to try to
keep them from swinging.
That's your job.
That's my job.
See that's why you tighten it up.
You tighten it up.
You tighten it up and you know, you tighten it up
and if you get it straight, it won't swing when you
pick it up.
See, you got to practice you to get to
get to feel a little job hell in that heavy load
when people work on that all the ground with you.
See Not every crane is used
inside, of course.
To build submarines during World War II,
Manitouac shipbuilding used their own Manitouac
speed crane.
In fact, they made many more speed
cranes than subs for the military, including six
used for salvage at Pearl Harbor.
At Milwaukee's Falk Corporation, crane
operators had an important job besides hauling
loads, warning workers when President Herman Falk
was prowling the shop floor.
The mechanically inclined Falk parlayed the
profit from the sale of a family brewery into a business
specializing in enormous gears.
These massive gears were cast from molten steel.
Gear turning gear transformed the power of
electric motors into hundreds of industrial
applications. Another Wisconsin company that made
huge things was Boloit Ironworks, later Boloit
Corporation. The company started out making
replacement parts for paper making machines.
Eventually, Boloit made their own machines and won an
international reputation by running a paper maker
at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
As time went on, they built ever bigger and faster machines.
Would you see those throughout Wisconsin?
Throughout Wisconsin.
Throughout the world.
Bob Fossler was a Boloit engineer who supervised
the installation of paper making machines.
To start a machine up, see it run for the first
time and then make paper.
That's why you kind of went back and did the
second and the third and the fourth one.
That was interesting.
Big equipment, heavy.
This equipment, when linked together, made
for some of the largest machines in the world.
What enters at one end, as little more than wood
pulp and water, emerges more than a hundred yards
later as crisp, clean rolls of fresh paper,
spooled up at speeds reaching 60 miles an hour.
Companies that make big things by their nature take on huge
risks. In the late 1990s, the Boloit Corporation ran
into serious financial trouble.
In the year 2000, the company held one of
the biggest industrial auctions in the world as they
were forced to shut down and sell off the company's
assets. The Boloit Corporation was added to
the list of Wisconsin companies that no longer make
the really big stuff.
Well, it was a very, very diversified company that
manufactured basically any industrial type
product that you could almost imagine.
We made all heavy shass for hydraulic turbines, steam
turbines, crushers.
Big stuff.
Nobody else around that area or the states could
make these big pieces.
For decades, Alice Chambers was the biggest
company in Wisconsin.
The biggest company with the
most employees at one point over 35,000, but no one works
for Alice Chambers anymore.
By 1880, the Edward P.
Alice Company was already Milwaukee's largest industry.
It merged in 1901 with other heavy machinery makers
to form Alice Chambers.
The biggest company also made some of the biggest stuff
at its new West Alice plant.
If all its buildings had been placed end to end,
they would have extended two and three quarter
miles. The plant had 21 miles of railway track, 162 cranes, and
a total floor space of almost 3 million square feet.
Today, the area where the Alice Chambers
factory grounds used to be is a strip mall, an
overhead crane still hangs from the ceiling of a
shoe store, a vivid symbol of the change away from
our manufacturing economy.
Part of the old Alice Chambers plant is now the
home of Regenco, a company that still services and
repairs electrical turbines for Midwest utility companies.
Alice Chambers is gone, but not forgotten, by a group of retired
supervisors and engineers who still meet for breakfast
once a month and reminisce about their lives in the
biggest job shop in the world.
Do you think that the work at Alice Chambers, because
there was so much big stuff, was it different than working
maybe other Milwaukee factories or the Milwaukee plant?
No, no doubt it would.
See, you got to consider it at most of the work
that was done at the big stuff in Alice Chambers
was what they called job shop work.
It was like one of a kind, two of a kind.
If you want something made, nobody else
can make it, we will.
Some of the larger items Alice Chambers made included
hydroelectric turbines for power plants for
the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam.
One of the world's largest hydroelectric installations.
The first four turbines for the Hoover Dam were
made in sections and transported on 150 rail cars
to be joined together on site.
The Alice Chambers complex brought together the
means to make big stuff.
They had large overhead cranes, a huge plant and
highly skilled craftsmen.
It was fun.
One of the things about Alice Chambers
is no day was the same.
Everything was a challenge.
Making huge stuff creates huge challenges.
Alice Chambers' employees had
to design the machinery, make it, put it together,
test it and then take it apart to ship it.
And they would normally ship them in the, just the way the
glass is running on a table.
It's vertically so you could clear the various wires
and then it would go at the wee hours of the morning.
What did you work on?
What did you make?
Originally. Yeah.
Back in old days.
Yeah. Well, shafts.
It was able to steam turbine parts.
The most I enjoyed about Alice Chambers was in my later
years when I was an engineering and you take a drawing and
you're actually, you're the father of this part.
You decide how you're going to make it and how much it's going
to cost and you try to make it the most reasonable and
then you go out and shop and you actually
not supervised but you're there while it's being made
and when it's all finished it's something that you
created.
Working for Alice Chambers provided an interesting life
for almost three generations.
Some workers were employed by Alice Chambers
for 30, 40, 50 years.
I had 42 years of study work.
I never was laid off one day in all those years I worked.
My father worked at Alice Chambers for 40 some years.
He was never laid off in all those years.
Alice Chambers was like a big family.
Employment peaked with a shift to wartime production
during World War II.
America had started on the greatest program
of military production.
The world had ever seen.
But hard times fell on Alice Chambers in the 1970s and 80s.
The company entered into a joint venture with Siemens,
a German electronics and engineering firm.
And this was probably a business decision that
also led to our downfall.
By 1988 Alice Chambers faced bankruptcy and eventually
sold its business to Siemens.
Siemens however moved its production out of state
and closed the West Alice operations in 1999.
The end of an era of making really big stuff.
Alice Chambers was the largest plant in the area and you
took a pride in your work.
Well I guess I'm proud as to the fact that
it was a large family.
It was really steady employment.
You could provide for your family and you
could buy a house.
I don't think any company had more television
than those Chambers.
[Music]
Why go through all the effort to preserve this stuff?
This is our nation's history.
If you don't know where you've been, how do you
know where you're going?
Now back here you got a what's this or just a big tank.
Okay. In case we need a big
tank for something.
Okay now here we're seeing some of your cranes.
What is this?
This is a unit crane.
It was built in Milwaukee.
If you can lift it you can swing it.
Okay. But if you if you have to
reach out for it you can't lift a crane tip first.
Just one of those little idiosyncrasies that you
have to live with when you're on the cranes.
I'll remember that.
What in the world is this?
Well this is a table for a boring meal.
It's upside down.
In other words it's easier if you have a big piece to
lay it down than hang it up.
I'm Peter Bernow and I've never really been able to separate
my hobby from my business.
I'm in a very fortunate position.
I've carried on a lifetime love affair with machinery.
Peter Bernow operates what looks like a mechanics junkyard.
Old machinery parts and pieces weather in the sun.
But he says everything here can and will someday be used again.
Westing house.
Nice. Very nice.
Bernow ran steam locomotive, all gone now for the US Army.
He says he's been a shop man all his life and his
love of machinery led him to his life-long work
as a freelance engineer and his unusual hobby.
He collects heavy machinery.
Well I collect to a certain extent mainly what I
work with all my life.
One thing I've always had to love for is
overhead traveling cranes.
Overhead cranes ride on tracks above a shop floor.
They move big, heavy equipment from one side
of a factory to another.
Bernow owns about 25 overhead cranes.
They're stored outside in various locations.
Many of them deep in the underbrush, overgrown with
weeds, grasses and trees.
But Bernow says that's just the best way to preserve them.
One of the problems that we've had in the past is vandalism.
So this is a security device?
This is sort of security.
Several of the cranes' owns were made in Milwaukee by
Pauline and Harnishfager.
How many Harnishfager cranes do you have here?
Oh I'm going to guess probably 20.
20. Watch where you're walking
here because there's all sorts of little things
hiding around in the grass.
Well this is like a different type of
archive than I'm used to.
But that's really what this is isn't it?
Yes. This is a heavy
equipment archive.
And how many archives are there like this around the country?
There are a lot of collectors like you?
No. Why not?
I really don't know.
Probably because insanity is not that prevalent.
I think it's a dedication.
This came from Alice Chalmers foundry.
Oh really?
Boy this is a beauty.
Now this is also, yes I see Pauline and Harnishfager.
Yeah this is a PNH.
Oh look how big it is though.
The heck did you move this thing?
We just picked it off our truck with one of our cranes.
This is a toy compared to the ones that are over there.
We've got a hundred ton of cranes over there.
Look those things are huge.
Hey watch out for the fingernails.
Let me, let's go through this way.
Okay. I think there's a piece
of, you're on a hook.
What was the hundred ton crane used for and
where did you get it?
It came out of Alice Chalmers and it was,
it was their biggest of the older cranes.
Peter Verno helped establish Threshermann's park,
located between Edgerton and Jamesville.
Every Labor Day weekend, ancient machinery comes
to life and operators demonstrate just how it works.
This is what I'm told is the world's largest
remaining steam shovel.
Who built it?
It's built by the Cyrus Erie in Milwaukee.
South Milwaukee.
But you Cyrus Erie was known for building
specialized heavy machinery and they built the shovels
that dug the Panama Canal.
This is bigger than the ones that used to be working out.
Much bigger.
They brought this here in pieces.
How do you put it back together?
With difficulty.
Verno hopes to have it up and running in the
park by next Labor Day.
And this is all put together to hold this bucket.
Tell me about this bucket.
All right.
Well, what's this made at them?
This bucket is, is what's called a misabi dipper.
Uh-huh. It was a special bucket
that was designed for the abrasive iron ore
on the misabi iron range.
In terms of the restoration, how much of this will have
to be restored and how much can you stand as is?
Well, actually I don't think outside of taking
the shiv apart and going over some of the bearings,
there's a great deal of restoration here,
more cleaning and painting than anything else.
Oh, what color were you painted?
Black. Always black.
Cranes were always black.
Why preserve this?
Why talk about great men like George Washington
or Thomas Jefferson?
It's the same thing.
Industrial heritage is the same thing?
Yes. And when you stop to
think it was the industry, the things that we're
looking at right now, that not only built this
country, but made it great.
A lot of them made in Wisconsin.
Made in Wisconsin.
Great big stuff.
Yup.
[laughs]
[music]
Major funding for Wisconsin Stories is provided by
the MeadWitter Foundation Incorporated.
Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin.
Additional funding is provided by the Halbert and
Alice Cadish Foundation.
Philip J.
and Elizabeth B.
Hendrickson. And an advised fund of
the Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin.