Model of an Artillery Crane on Tracks

...; transferred from the Ministerie van Marine (Department of the Navy), The Hague, to the museum, 1883

ObjectNumber: NG-MC-1035

Model of a heavy crane with sledge and load-carrying platform, running on tracks, and a cart.

The crane moves on eight wheels. There are two winches to drive the tackle, with cranks at both sides. By altering the position of the toothed wheels, the winches can be combined, but the system no longer works. The hoist pivots on its axis. The rope runs on a sheave through the king post, in between two vertical rollers to another sheave back through the king post, and finally to a pulley at the top. At the end of the rope, a ring and double hook are fixed. There are three sections of tracks, of which one is a turntable with a ball bearing. One sledge is a low frame with eight wheels, like the crane. The other is a load-carrying platform with tracks, to be placed upside down on the other tracks with balls in between, the rails functioning as ball-bearing channels.

The track sections and the load-carrying platform all have rings set in the sides for hauling and steadying with ropes. The tracks can be attached to the cart, which has a winch at the front to pull the crane or the sledge on top of it. The cart frame is a continuation of the tracks. The cart has two small wheels at the front, which can be steered, and two big wheels at the back. According to the original inventory, there ought to be four sledges and three platforms on ball bearings in total. All the balls and some other parts are missing.

The track system was copied from the invention of Count Marin Carburi (Marin de Carbus, d. 1782), lecturer at the Naval Institute in St Petersburg, to transport the immense granite base for the equestrian statue of Tsar Peter the Great. The tracks are remarkably similar to the model in the Van Marum collection of the Teylers Museum in Haarlem.¹¹Haarlem, Teylers Museum, inv. no. FK 0051, see G.l’E. Turner, Van Marum’s Scientific Instruments in Teyler’s Museum, in E. Lefebvre and J.G. de Bruijn (eds.), Martinus van Marum: Life and Work, 6 vols., vol. 2, Leiden 1973, pp. 127-401, no. 77.

Scale unknown.

J.M. Obreen et al., handwritten inventory list for items 944 to 1431, 1884, manuscript in HNA 476 RMA, inv. no. 1089, no. 1035; F.M. Feldhaus, ‘Ein 1500-t-Transport auf Kugeln’, Fördertechnik, 18 August 1924; G.l’E. Turner, Van Marum’s Scientific Instruments in Teyler’s Museum, in E. Lefebvre and J.G. de Bruijn (eds.), Martinus van Marum: Life and Work, 6 vols., vol. 2, Leiden 1973, pp. 127-401, no. 77

J. van der Vliet, 2016, 'anonymous, Model of an Artillery Crane on Tracks, Netherlands, c. 1800 - c. 1857', in J. van der Vliet and A. Lemmers (eds.), Navy Models in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.433074