Backgound on the name "Bulldozer"

Around 1880, the common usage of "bull-dose" in the United States meant administering a large and efficient dose of any sort of medicine or punishment. If you "bull-dosed" someone, you gave him a severe whipping or coerced or intimidated him in some other way, often with firearms. This must have happened pretty often, because in 1886, with a slight variation in spelling, a "bulldozer" had come to mean both a large-caliber pistol and the person who wielded it. In short, these were people and weapons that got things done in an efficient, if somewhat blunt, manner. Anything that got in their way was leveled. So, naturally, by the late 1800s, "bulldozing" came to mean using brawny force to push over, or through, any obstacle.

It wasn’t really until 1930, after the introduction of the "crawler" or "track-type" tractor, that the term bulldozing also came to be commonly associated with the act of earth moving, specifically by using a large, slightly curved, steel blade attached to the front of a tractor to push things around.

Have the teams build a "bull dozer". The teams would have to construct a vehicle (tractor, tug etc.) to move a digging device (bucket, blade etc.) that can cuts and move dirt from one location to another. There are many possible solutions to this problem. Some that come to mind are a bucket mounted on the front of an old car or a scraper device pulled by a vehicle. The range of potential solutions would make this an interesting challenge.

The challenge itself could be literally to move a mountain of dirt. It can be made more difficult by requiring that the teams reconstruct the mountain. The amount of dirt moved in each bite, the number of bites per unit time pose an interesting tradeoff in machine size. The ability to accurately control the amount and movement dirt is yet another problem to be addressed.

-- Bob Dunstan (rdunstan@teleport.com), January 16, 2001

Answers

two big piles of dirt. Chalk lines drawn on ground around piles first team to cover area inside circle with dirt with no ground showing (paint ground orange?) wins. Not just dozers but a pan or grader would work as well.

-- Stephen A. Binion (Stephenbinion@hotmail.com), January 17, 2001.