Backhoe The founder of the JCB company, Joseph Cyril Bamford, holds the honour of being the only non-American in the U.S. construction industry's hall of fame. The American company Hy-Dynamic, a division of Bucyrus-Erie, introduced the second purpose-built American-made backhoe loader in 1959, the Dynahoe Model A. It offered a 14,000 lb. operating weight, 14-foot dig depth, and was powered by either a 65 hp Continental flat-head "Red Seal" 6-cylinder gasoline engine, or starting in 1961, a Detroit Diesel 353 diesel engine. The gasoline engine was phased out in 1964, with only diesel-powered units produced from that point on. The company
Backhoe filed a patent #3,249,244 for the first extendible boom. Patent #3,273,729 was filed in January 1965 by Vaino J. Holopainen for the first hydraulic thumb. Although Wain-Roy Corporation no longer exists, the Wain Roy product line of backhoe attachments and couplers is still available through the Woods Equipment Company of Rockford, Illinois, US. Because of the long-time predominance of the JCB marque in the United Kingdom and Ireland, it has become a genericized trademark there, and backhoe-equipped diggers are commonly called JCBs, while the term "backhoe" as an excavator component is almost unknown to the general public in this context.