An Account of the Operations of the Gunpowder Pile-Driver
Samuel R. Probasco · Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers · 1874
The machine known as “Shaw's patent gunpowder pile-driver” was set at work in October, 1872, on a line of sheet piles, to be driven for a dam now in process of construction for a reservoir in the valley of Parsonage creek on Long Island. The material in which the piles are driven is sand, mixed with fine gravel, in places cemented together by a deposit of iron, which renders it excessively hard, and difficult to move with the aid of a pick, and causes it to resemble the traditional “hard pan.”