Photo of a Rock Crusher in Batangas Province [July 1914, BPW Quarterly Bulletin]
This photograph is part of a series showing construction projects undertaken by the Bureau of Public Works during the American colonial era. All photographs have been digitally extracted from the Quarterly Bulletins of the bureau and processed using graphics editing software to improve quality. It goes without saying that the eventual output of each extract was always going to be dependent on the quality of the original scan.
About the photograph below, it that of a rock crusher somewhere in Batangas Province in 1914. Because road construction was ongoing in that year at a feverish pace from eastern to western Batangas, the use of a rock crushing machine would have made economic sense in comparison to shipping in the crushed rock from elsewhere or breaking the stone by hand, as used to be the case.
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| A rock-crushing machine somewhere in Batangas Province. Image digitally extracted from the July 1914 edition of the Bureau of Public Works Quarterly Bulletin. |
The crushed stone is then used as the primary material in the paving of what was a relatively new technology at the time, the macadamized road.