Yellow Steel: The Story of the Earthmoving Equipment Industry (review)
Bruce E. Seely · Technology and Culture · 2001
As a child in the late 1950s and 1960s, I watched with some excitement the operation of many of the machines about which William Haycraft writes, often while detouring around an interstate highway construction project encountered on a family vacation. But as Haycraft notes in his introduction, there is a dearth of good historical information on this industry that has literally reshaped the earth on which we live. Yellow Steel succeeds in filling part of that void. This is a business history that focuses on the firms, but there is also substantial information on the timing, if not the details, of the invention and operation of earthmoving machinery.