One of those childhood memories, an experience I did not fully appreciate at the time...
When I was about 10 or 11, my dad took me on a cook's tour of one of those big machines. I think he knew the guy from his amateur radio club, but don't know. The man at the controls had the same last name as one of my schoolmates, and was her uncle as I recall. Maybe they met at a PTA meeting.
So anyway, we went to the site, parked, checked in at the office and got hard hats, and went over to the shovel. It said 'Peabody' on the side, near the top. It was bigger than most, maybe all, the buildings in Evansville. We were guided to the entrance, then to the center axis of the machine, which was constantly swinging back and forth around a vertical axis. We rode up a rickety elevator to about the 4th-5th floor level... Enormous electric motors in the back were starting, stopping, and reversing, pulling twisted-woven steel cables about 6" in diameter through the heart of the machine's interior.
Presently we arrived in the relatively tiny control cab, a little room with windows on all sides, from which you could see everything on the site. The scale of the thing was just awesome. My classmate's uncle showed us the levers and buttons he used to control it. He could have scooped up the whole parking lot, with all the cars and the office building in one bucket load. But of course, he was working with the bulldozers down on the mine face to expose the coal seam.
On the way out, we went by a status panel in the big center room, with meters showing how the power was flowing through the motors. There was one labeled 'Kilovars', and its needle would swing back and forth as they spooled up and down. I don't remember exactly how many kilovars it would register, maybe it was calibrated in '000s. The lights in people's homes in Warrick County would brighten and dim as the big machine did its work, back in the '60s.
