Bobcat Honored at National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum
An Inspiring History on Display
To help put history on display, Joe Keller, the son of Inductee Louis Keller and nephew of Inductee Cyril Keller, traveled nearly 1,400 miles from North Dakota to deliver a 1958 prototype compact loader to the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum, located within the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. The journey included a stop at the National Inventors Hall of Fame headquarters in North Canton, Ohio, and many Bobcat dealerships along the way.
Now proudly displayed at the center of our new exhibit, this prototype was created in response to a request from a farmer. At Keller Welding in Rothsay, Minnesota, the Keller brothers were approached by a local farmer, Eddie Velo. He needed a machine to clear his turkey barn of manure but be light enough to operate on the second floor and agile enough to navigate barn poles. The Kellers designed and built a solution in just six weeks. Using mechanical parts from local junkyards and bars from the old Rothsay jail, they created the first small, lightweight, three-wheel front-end loader.
The Keller brothers understood that one of the disadvantages of early motorized loaders was that with all wheels turning in the same direction, operating them in small spaces was nearly impossible because they required a wide area for turning around. With their patented clutch system, the Kellers made it possible to put one side of the loader into forward and the other side into reverse, without the use of a transmission gearshift or a steering wheel. It could turn completely around in a circle the size of its own length, with one front wheel moving forward and the other moving in reverse, pivoting around the caster wheel.
The impressive, full-size prototype you can see in our new exhibit is one of the first seven compact loaders the Keller brothers built in the late 1950s, helping to launch the compact equipment industry and evolving into the famous Bobcat loaders we know today.
We were lucky enough to have Joe stop by our Bobcat of Hagerstown location on his journey to the NIHF, take a look at our recap video on our YouTube and read more about the history of how the Keller brothers started the compact equipment industry that we know today:
🔗 Meet Joe Keller: Bobcat of Hagerstown
*All article credits go to the National Inventors Hall of Fame: https://www.invent.org/blog/innovation-display/compact-loader-prototype?j=76906039&sfmc_sub=1859997725&l=7992103_HTML&u=895215011&mid=524004817&jb=5*