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Aug 08, 2023

Child's play behind Kiwi inventor's billion dollar brainwave

OPINION: Did a relatively unknown engineer in Golden Bay invent the first ever

OPINION: Did a relatively unknown engineer in Golden Bay invent the first ever oil-powered hydraulic digger?

The Hitachi Construction Machinery Corporation of Japan is widely credited with its evolution, their first commercial excavator being the UH03 launched in 1955.

Hitachi went on the capture the world-wide distribution of their machine which like no other has revolutionized earthworks, ditch digging, construction and demolition in nearly every country of the world. Hitachi's revenue last year was nearly US$80 billion, much of it still from digger sales.

But did Hitachi actually invent the machine, - ‘built with all Japanese technologies’ – as they still claim to this day?

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The reality is that all through history, many an amazing invention has been inspired by some inspired innovator toiling away for years in a remote shed, usually never acknowledged.

And I believe that the inspired inventor in the digger's case was a self-trained mechanical engineer from Golden Bay - Malcom (Mick) Ronald Couper.

Born in 1903 in the Rai Valley, his parents were Daniel James and Maud Couper who farmed near Pelorus Bridge.

In the late 1920s, the family shifted over to Golden Bay, first farming at Patons Rock before moving to Rototai.

From an early age, their middle son Malcolm showed huge mechanical aptitude and fell naturally into blacksmithing jobs around the farm before going on to undertake engineering jobs for farmers around the district.

Never at any time did he receive any formal engineering or mechanical training.

Over his highly productive working career, Couper operated three workshops around Takaka; one in the Star Garage building in Motupipi St, opposite where the Fire Station is now, another in a long-gone tin shed at the top of Riley St, and the third, his largest, being the sprawling shed which still stands amongst the impressive stand of big native trees halfway along the Puramahoi Straight. It was here that he built his hydraulic digger.

Nephew Leon Couper of Takaka remembers how his uncle disliked seeing metal heated by an oxy-acetelene torch, always preferring to fashion things using traditional techniques.

"But we were always impressed by what he could come up with."

Some of his amazing machinery creations included a giant plough which got towed behind a crawler tractor to plough in manuka, enabling some vast tracts of pakihi land in Golden Bay to be broken in.

Another of his inventions was the tobacco planting machine which carried two seated planters, one on each side, who fed seedlings from trays into the machine which planted them and then neatly covered up their roots. First used on Inglis’ Tobacco farm in Motueka, the use of his machines became widespread, doing away with the back-breaking hand planting required up to then.

Couper ended up near mass-producing them for tobacco growers.

Around 1950, Couper became inspired with the idea of building a pressurised oil-driven hydraulic excavator capable of digging ditches to drain wet paddocks and swamps.

Until then, it was largely a matter of hand digging or using explosives to blow sizeable trenches and then try to tidy them up with a shovel. That was not only hugely laborious, but the result was often messy.

Using a Meccano set to mock-up his final creation, it is said Couper spent the best part of a year manufacturing his oil powered hydraulic digger which sat on a single axel, dual-wheeled trailer which got towed behind a tractor.

The operator sat on a seat slightly to one side and operated four levers to control the machine's digging arm and bucket. Providing the hydraulic pressure was a Volkswagen motor mounted just towards the rear.

Leon Couper spent many hours operating his uncle's machine and remembers how the controls were slightly delayed. "You had to get a ‘feel’ for it. When you wanted to stop digging you had to anticipate it because it wasn't immediate."

Jim Robertson also used the machine on his Wainui Bay farm after purchasing it from Greg Baird who used it to dig all the ditches over at Totaranui.

"It was a great machine, worked well, but you had to shift it every 10 feet or so because that was its reach limit," he recalled. "The turntable didn't go right around like modern diggers do either, it was more like 160 degrees, but that worked OK for ditching to be able to dump the spoil off to one side."

The pivotal event for Couper's marvellous machine came soon after he completed it around 1953.

Word must have got out, because it wasn't long before a group of three ‘Japanese Industrialists’ turned up in Takaka to examine the machine.

At a time when Japanese tourists to rural New Zealand were uheard of, the three men stuck out like a sore thumb. Also recalled is that they took heaps of photos and detailed measurements, as well as asking lots of questions, which the affable Couper was only too happy to answer.

Patenting his invention was something he had never considered, the legal maze of paperwork well out of his experience range. And no doubt the men from the fledgling Hitachi Machinery Corporation well appreciated this. They hop-footed straight back to Japan, and within two years, their first little slick orangey-yellow digger, the UHO3 was rolled out onto the world market.

It would take another decade for the fully rotating machines to become a common sight in New Zealand.

After Malcolm Couper died in 1976, his excavator lay idle around Jim Robertson's farm at Wainui Bay until it was picked up by Sollys Freight around 10 years back and taken to the Golden Bay Machinery and Early Settlers Museum in Rockville.

There it still sits, right out the back, in the open, barely admired or appreciated any more. I can't help but think it's a sad fate for such an amazing invention, quite likely a world first, just unacknowledged.

I hope one day Couper's digger gets restored and painted up again, paraded out on ‘Steam Up Day’ to dig a trench or two, show a few slick young farmers how it used to be done, before mass market Hitachi sneaked in and stole the show, claiming it was all their idea.