From the Library of Congress comes this curious contraption - apparently a crude dredge, invented in the late 1700s in America. The only information we have on this odd item is the description from the Library of Congress: “Print shows a man manipulating a large floating device with pulleys and a scoop attached, driven by horse-power, for dredging around docks and in rivers.”

You gotta love good ol’fashioned ingenuity, eh? A horse powered dredge! This was 300 years ago.