Just as Germany's strength in underground machinery supply derives from domestic mining activity so the wide variety of mining equipment on offer to the world's surface mine and quarry operators reflects the nation's very considerable production of raw materials for the building materials industry, minerals for the chemicals, metals and other process industries, and last but not least brown coal primarily used for electric power generation. German manufacturers established a position in the manufacture of hydraulically powered machinery for construction at an early stage of this technology's development and by the 1960s had added hydraulic breakers to the wheel loaders and hydraulic excavators already established in the market. This decade also saw the introduction of effective larger hydraulic excavators for quarrying and mining, displacing the smaller sizes of rope shovel. More recently, as Prof. Tudeshki pointed out, large hydraulic breakers have been added to the quarry and surface mine operator's armory. And increasingly large and reliable designs, attractively priced, have enabled the hydraulic excavator to compete with the rope shovel across most of the two machine types' application range. Today two of the four main brands of hydraulic excavator widely used in mining are built in Germany and a third just across the border in France.
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