LBX Company
LBX is an American industrial company manufacturing excavators, forestry equipment and scrap material handlers.
Link-Belt is headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky. It is a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Heavy Industries.
LBX shares the Link-Belt brand with its sister company, Link-Belt Cranes. The two companies split in 1998. Sumitomo operates them as separate organizations.
History
Expansion into coal and materials handling
Ewart quickly found customers requesting help engineering and constructing industrial facilities, especially coal-handling systems. During this time, coal fueled almost everything. Railroads especially used huge amounts of coal to power steam engines.To serve the market, Ewart founded founded two new companies. In 1880, he created Link-Belt Machinery in Chicago, "to design, build, and supply accessory parts, and install elevating and conveying machinery employing Ewart chains."
Then in 1888, he formed Link-Belt Engineering in Philadelphia. This company built a factory in Philadelphia's Nicetown neighborhood.
By 1894, the three companies had constructed facilities for railroads including the New York Central and Hudson, the Philadelphia and Reading, and the Chicago and West Michigan.
Link-Belt coal-handling cranes
During this period, cranes and excavators shared many similarities. Huge steam shovels and steam cranes operated from railroad chassis. Workers laid rail tracks where the shovel was expected to work, then repositioned as required.Link-Belt Machinery quickly developed a steam-powered crane for wide-gauge rails. It used a clamshell-bucket for coal-handling. As shown in the photo at the right, the crane had a large house-like structure mounted on its rail chassis. The middle house-like structure held a steam engine like those used for locomotives.
Through the turn of the century, Link-Belt expanded its line of steam-powered, heavy-duty coal-handling cranes. The company also expanded into lighter, more versatile rail-based cranes.
1906–1939: Link-Belt moves to Chicago, expands into excavation
Move to Chicago and consolidation to single company
By the early 1900s, Link-Belt had moved well beyond its initial drive-chain origins. To support the growth, in 1906 the three Link-Belt companies consolidated into one publicly traded organization: the Link-Belt Company headquartered in Chicago. Charles Piez, who had started at Link-Belt as a Nicetown-based engineer-draftsman, became company president.1920–1939: Crawler chassis and dragline excavators
The 1900s brought new technologies to cranes and excavators. Continuous-track crawler systems moved the machines off rail platforms, allowing them to move freely. Dragline excavators expanded the power of crane-shovel systems.By 1922, Link-Belt expanded into the crawler-mounted crane-shovel excavator market. The company continued building rail-based cranes and material-handling equipment, but the rail-based market continued shrinking.
By its 50th anniversary in 1925, Link-Belt operated ten large manufacturing plants and 27 branch offices across the United States. It offered materials-handling products, including locomotive- and crawler-type cranes and excavators. By the 1930s, Link-Belt excavators ranged from 3/4-yd to a 2-1/5-yd capacity.
1939: Link-Belt Speeder acquisition and Shovel-Cranes move to Cedar Rapids
In 1939, Link-Belt purchased Speeder Machinery, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based excavator company. This returned Link-Belt to the Eastern Iowa area where Will Ewart had invented his replaceable-link drive belt. Belle Plaine is 47 miles west of Cedar Rapids.Speeder Machinery
Cedar Rapids-based Speeder Machinery built crane-shovels. It was an innovator in truck-based excavators, developing the world's first wheel-mounted excavator in 1922. It also built smaller-capacity crane-shovels, down to 3/8-yard.The merged companies formed the Link-Belt Speeder Corporation as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Link-Belt Company of Chicago. The new Cedar Rapids location also offered a strong base of crane manufacturing experience, since it was also the home of a large Harnischfeger crane factory.
Disruptive innovations: gasoline power and hydraulics
This period put Link-Belt into business history for managing disruptive innovation. Harvard economist Clayton Christiansen analyzed the mechanical excavator industry to understand why disruptive technology innovations frequently cause well-managed companies to fail. Christiansen tracked excavator companies navigating two key technology changes: moving to gasoline power and switching to hydraulic mechanisms.1920s: Steam engines to gasoline and diesel power
The technology transition to gasoline power was less disruptive than the one to hydraulic mechanisms. Clayton identified Link-Belt as one of thirty-two steam shovel manufacturers operating in the early 1920s. These companies faced a radical technological change to gasoline power, changing their products' foundations. "Where steam shovels used steam pressure to power a set of steam engines to extend and retract the cables that actuated their buckets, gasoline shovels used a single engine and a very different system of gearing, clutches, drums, and brakes to wind and unwind the cable."Most of the largest manufacturers survived this transition, making gasoline power more of a "sustaining innovation." Following gasoline power, 1928 and onward included less-radical transitions to diesel engines and electric motors. Clayton also noted the surviving companies integrated new articulated-boom technology, "which allowed longer reach, bigger buckets, and better down-reaching flexibility."
This disruptive period in excavator history set the background for the children's classic Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, based on a machine from Marion Steam Shovel.
1936–1970: Hydraulics innovation leading to market leadership
Early adoption of hydraulicsClayton found Link-Belt was part of a much smaller group surviving the transition to hydraulics. Before hydraulic technology, cranes and crane-excavators used cable actuators to control movements. Operators would stand all day at the crane controls, pulling large levers to engage the cables. This was difficult, tiring work. The cables were also dangerous when they snapped.
Hydraulic systems allowed the operator to sit and operate "fingertip" controls. This made the work less tiring and safer.
Link-Belt adopted the new technology early. It began the switch in 1936, before the 1939 Speeder acquisition. The company later branded its hydraulic controls as "Speed-o-Matic."
1950–1970: Market shakeout from disruptive hydraulic technology
Hydraulic innovators like Link-Belt drove a market shakeup. Clayton identifies Link-Belt as one of about 30 established cable-actuated excavator companies of the 1950s. By 1970, only four of these companies had survived by transitioning to hydraulics. These four were Link-Belt, Insley, Koehring, and Little Giant.
A few other companies survived by shifting to the upper end of the market, producing dragline excavators for strip mining. This included former market leader Marion Steam Shovel. which changed to Marion Power Shovel and focused on dragline systems including ones that helped dig the Panama Canal.
New major competitors, domestic and international
Link-Belt faced strong new competition from other hydraulic innovators, which Clayton identifies as Case, John Deere, Drott, Ford, Bamford, Poclain, International Harvester, Caterpillar, O & K, Demag, Liebherr, Komatsu, and Hitachi.A number of these entrants came to excavators through the invention of the backhoe. These small-capacity excavators were initially mounted on the back of tractors, either farm or industrial varieties. This opened the excavator market to general contractors.
Link-Belt Speeder succeeded in competing against the new entrants, making the company a showcase for managing disruptive innovation. Link-Belt Speeder's rapid adoption of the new hydraulic technologies let it survive where most other established companies failed.
Worldwide market leadership and LS-98
This early adoption of hydraulics launched Link-Belt Speeder to the forefront of the crane and crane-shovel excavator markets worldwide. The 1954 flagship model LS-98 platform offers a key example. The LS-98 is one of the most successful pieces of construction equipment ever built. Production of these cranes and crane-excavators continued for over 42 years. Link-Belt built over 7,000 units and LS-98 units are still operating around the world.Link-Belt Speeder faced growing competition from Japanese manufacturers. Japanese labor was cheaper than America's. To address this and expand sales in Asia, Link-Belt Speeder established an agreement with Japan's Sumitomo Heavy Industries. Sumitomo began manufacturing Link-Belt products under license, selling them in Asia. Link-Belt also began contracting with Sumitomo to build parts and models for sale in the USA.