By Tom Berry, HCEA | January 22, 2021
Sometime around 1940, contractors Ray and Koop Ferwerda of Cleveland, Ohio, encountered a situation that required slope work that could only be done manually.
Given the scarcity of labor at the time, something else was needed. They rigged up a primitive hydraulic machine with a blade at the end of a telescopic boom and mounted it to a circle on an old truck. Seeing that they were on to something, they soon redesigned the boom to a triangular cross-section for greater rigidity and added a mechanism to rotate the boom 45 degrees left and right. By 1945, the machine had been designated the Gradall, and excavating buckets were available for it.