Excavator

The civil engineering contractor Alphonse Couvreux was one of the first in Europe to transform the bucket dredger, initially used for waterway maintenance, into a dry excavator. In 1859 he registered a patent for a ‘dredger with inclined slings’ for the extraction and loading of ballast in the construction of the Ardennes Railway (1860–63). On the strength of this project, in 1863 Couvreux’s company was awarded a contract to dig a section of the Suez Canal. His presentation of these gargantuan projects at the Universal Exposition in 1867 crowned their success. For the 1878 Exposition, Couvreux had a scale model made of his latest excavator, used for the modification of the Ghent-Terneuzen Canal in Belgium. The locomotive drives a bucket dredger working perpendicularly to the rails, capable of excavating to a depth of 5 metres. This model was donated to the Conservatoire after the exhibition.