At the Pennsylvania Railroad Ore Docks on the Cleveland waterfront, three Huletts of the M. A. Hanna Company are dipping into the hold of the Capt. Henry Jackman . The Jackman is perhaps eight hundred feet long, but the big vessel is if not exactly dwarfed, at least seriously diminished by the astonishing machines that are unloading it. Part shovel, part crane, and wholly prehistoric in scale, they are lifting out iron ore in seventeen-ton bites and dropping it into hopper cars for shipment to the Weirton steel mill in West Virginia.

“They’re about our only customer, Weirton,” says Mike Seljan, glancing down the tracks to where flimsy-looking but impressively powerful narrowgauge shunt engines are nosing the cars in under the Huletts. “We used to unload three hundred boats a year. Now we get thirty.” Tom Koskey, next to him, nods; both men have worked here for eighteen years, and both have had family working here before them. But neither has put in as much family or time as Ron Zimmer, who has been working along this stretch of waterfront for thirty-two years, and whose grandfather started here unloading ore boats “with a shovel and wheelbarrow.”

Grandfather Zimmer’s work was labor-intensive on the pyramid-building scale, and it gave a young Ohio engineer named George H. Hulett an idea. This was in the late nineteenth century, when it looked as though the Lake Superior region would be shipping iron ore to the lower lake ports forever. The only problem was how to move it on to the mills faster. Hulett devised a titanic steel arm to pluck the cargo from the boats and put it on the trains. Andrew Carnegie built the first of them at Conneaut, Ohio, in 1898, and although the ones in Cleveland went up little more than a decade later, they were vastly improved. By then a gifted engineer named Samuel T. Wellman had become the head of Hulett’s company, and the machines working today are secondgeneration ones incorporating his improvements.

They’re very big. Each weighs some fifteen hundred tons, and a tenth of the weight is in the eighty-foot walking beam that raises and lowers the arm into the ship’s hold. The arm hangs at the end of the beam, and at the end of the arm, the bucket. In between is the operator’s cab. Ron Misenko has let me into his. As a relief operator, he goes up and down the line spelling the other operators: work is constant when a boat is being unloaded. After twentyfour years at the ore docks, it’s all pretty routine to him. It isn’t to me: we ride right down into the hold where Misenko throws a lever smoothed by decades of handling. This works the bucket, whose jaws do not swing on a single pivot like a scissors but rather slide open on the horizontal to scrape in the greatest possible load. Misenko closes them, and with a rustling of chain the cab glides—the motion is amazingly smooth—fifty feet up out of the hold into the spacious daylight of Lake Erie.

Misenko pulls another lever and takes us shoreward a few yards to drop the ore into a receiving hopper beneath, which in turn deposits it in a larry car—a smaller hopper on rails under the independent control of another operator. That man weighs out a half-carload of ore and slides it across the four railroad tracks—one for each Hulett—to drop it into the waiting car.

Three of the Huletts are working. “That means it’ll take about eleven and a half, twelve hours to unload the ship,” says Misenko. “Could be done in eight if all four were going.”

Why aren’t they? “We don’t have enough people. There were eighty or ninety when I came on. Now there are twenty-six.”

Nevertheless, the machines—survivors of some eighty that were built between Carnegie’s day and the mid1950s—do their job efficiently. Misenko recalls with some satisfaction that when one of the self-unloaders that have largely supplanted them got gummed up with red ore, “we had to get out the Huletts to scrape her down.”

Will they last? Frank Castenir, the superintendent, thinks they’ve got a good deal of life left in them, although they are a “high-maintenance item” and maintenance has had to be deferred for the last few years. There’s a shop where they can make just about any part that doesn’t require forging, but even so the Huletts are not cheap to run. For instance, they are powered by electricity, and they drink up twelve to fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of it a month when they’re working. But, says Castenir, so long as boats like the Jackman come down from Canada with ore and, after a scrubbing, go back with grain, the Huletts will have work to do. Ron Zimmer, whose grandfather’s job inspired the Huletts in the first place, is not so sure. When I explained to him that I was there to write an article about the Huletts, he said, “Better write fast.”