Bowles “Pull-type” packer system was something unique to his front loaders in that horizontal, single stage cylinders were located inside the body, pulling the blade toward the back of the hopper. The bucket had come off in favor of a forklift type coupling method, and containers of different sizes were given to the customers. Evolution quickly took hold of their original brainchild and by early 1954, Bowles was manufacturing front loaders with closed dump bodies paired with his “Pull-type” packer blade. The first 10 trucks created had a fixed bucket attached to a pair of straight arms, which emptied into an open dump body and were used for residential and bulk waste collection. and Samuel Vincen Bowles designed a special truck in Sun Valley, CA for Gentile’s refuse company, United Rubbish. The birth of the front loader happened in 1952 when Phil Gentile Sr. The stricter weight laws of the West Coast forced builders to develop creative ways to maximize the legal load while the East Coast focused on a higher compaction rate due to the bigger population ratio and less stringent weight restrictions.ġ952-1959: Humble Beginnings and Radical Ideas With an almost simultaneous creation on both sides of the country, the philosophy behind the front load design saw two schools of truck bodies emerge: East Coast and West Coast. The Front Loader was originally built for residential routes due to the lower loading height over rear loaders, but it found its true calling in the commercial sector, which made it become the most versatile collection vehicle on the market. In the 1950s, the refuse industry finally received a solution to their problem in the form of the Front End Load truck, which offered the first true automated collection method in America. Even though Dempster Brothers had developed a containerized method of refuse collection in 1937, their trucks could only transport one ‘dumpster’ at a time and served as an early role model for the development of the roll-off truck. While they offered a cleaner solution over open dump bodies and had started to gain favor from haulers, they still required a multi-man crew to hand load the garbage. Pre-war technology had already brought forth the bucket-rear loaders with a primitive style of compaction method. Refuse haulers and body manufactures saw the need for a better way to contain and streamline the collection of garbage, especially in bigger cities whose populations were ever-expanding and public health was a growing concern. Many industries grew by leaps and bounds experiencing a technological boom, which created many of the products we still use to this day. Post-World War II, that same tenacity continued and the economy saw a strong growth that was not expected by most skeptics who feared another Depression. The American industry machine went into overdrive during World War II with the entire country dedicated to producing new technologies and weapons to win the war. The story of the most versatile collection truck ever designed.
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