would race to see who could move the most dirt. Steam shovels assisted mining operations: the iron mines of Minnesota, the copper mines of Chile and Montana, placer mines of the Klondike – all had earth-moving equipment. With the burgeoning open-pit mines – first in Bingham Canyon, Utah – shovels became prominent. The shovels removed hillsides. As a result, steam shovels were used globally from Australia to Russia to coal mines in China. Shovels were used for construction, road and quarry work. Steam shovels became widely used in the 1920s in the road-building programs in North America. Thousands of miles of State Highways were built in this era, together with factories and many docks, ports, buildings, and grain elevators. Successors During the 1930s steam shovels were supplanted by simpler, cheaper diesel-powered excavating shovels that were the forerunners of those in use today. Open-pit mines were electrified at this time. Only after the Second World War, with the advent of robust high-pressure hydraulic hoses, did the more versatile hydraulic excavators take pre-eminence over the cable-hoisting winch shovels. Many steam shovels remained at work on the railways of developing nations until diesel engines supplanted them. Most have since been scrapped. Large, multi-ton mining shovels still use the cable-lift shovel arrangement. In the 1950s and 1960s, Marion Shovel built massive stripping shovels for coal operations in the Eastern US. Shovels of note were the Marion 360, the Marion 5900, and the largest shovel ever built, Marion 6360 The Captain – with a bucket – while Bucyrus constructed one of the most famous monsters: the Big Brutus, the largest still in existence. The GEM of Egypt (GEM standing for "Giant Excavating Machine" and Egypt referring to the Egypt Valley in Belmont County, eastern Ohio where it was first employed), which operated from 1967 to 1988, was of comparable size. It has since been dismantled. Although these big machines are still called steam shovels, they are more correctly known as power shovels since they use electricity to power their winches. Operation A steam shovel consists of: a bucket, usually with a toothed edge, to dig into the earth a "dipper" or "dipper stick" connecting the bucket to the boom a "boom" mounted on the rotating platform, supporting the dipper and its control wires a boiler a water tank and coal bunker steam engines and winches operator's controls a platform on which everything is mounted wheels