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It is always important to remember that heavy machinery plays an absolutely essential role in the modern world. Now is the time to see (and working) the world’s largest electric excavator, known by the well-known nickname “Big Brutus.”
Although not the greatest of all time, it is the largest that remains intact on the planet. This brutal electric excavator weighs 5,500 tons (that’s right, 5,500 tons) and its shell has the capacity of 150 tons.
The Big Brutus is technically the Bucyrus Erie 1850B model and is 48 meters high. It was assembled in the United States in the year 1962 by a team of 52 men for 11 months.
The 1850 B excavator was designed to have a 25-year life, but only worked for 10 years. Not because of technical problems, but because of financial and market issues, especially involving the price of low-sulfur coal in Wyoming and Montana .
To give you an idea, your electric motors had a total power equivalent to 15,000 horsepower. To feed all this, in the last month of operation in 1974, the electric excavator consumed the equivalent of 137 thousand dollars in electricity (updated value for inflation, which is approximately R $ 526 thousand in direct conversion).