Online Catalogue last updated 17th of September 2023
In 1880 Robert Magee Downie from Butler County, Pennsylvania, patented a portable steam well drilling machine. Within years the patent would change the way mankind would view water; water was now accessible and pumped from an 8 inch hole. The 3 foot well was obsolete. By 1885 the main office was in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. A decade would pass and the Keystone Driller was modified for oil and well drilling. Company offices would spring up in Joplin, Missouri and in South Africa.
In 1912 a Keystone machine was patented that became America's first portable backhoe. It would revolutionize highway construction in America. The machine was called the Keystone Skimmer. Gasoline and electrical models of the driller and skimmer were added to the production line. The machines followed United States soldiers in two World Wars around globe.
This is the history, with over 100 first time photos, the rise and fall, the tragedies and shock of percussion from 1978 to 1959 and the Cold War, from Butler County to Beaver Falls, from the Campine Canal in Belgium to the village of Ban-Me-Thout, Vietnam in 1965. And in a not so surprising discovery, many Keystone Drillers are yet found in use in America and across the world in 2007.
Code No. 013010, 96 pages, $30.00