Automatic Truck Loader Corporation New York, New York By Eric Voytko Automatic Truck Loader demonstrator from 1931, the driver may possibly be inventor Joseph Goodman     Joseph Goodman of New York built this refuse truck in 1931, from his patent application of the same year. The Automatic Truck Loader Corporation was a New York-based company, which was incorporated in Delaware. The company was located in Manhattan at 612-618 West 52nd street, in a building that was constructed in the 1880s as a stable for DSNY road-sweeper horses. However, this does not necessarily indicate any connection with the DSNY. Most likely, the department was no longer using the facility due to the motorization of their fleet, and had probably sold it.     Goodman's continuous-loading conveyor body, which carried refuse from the hopper boot and up into the main compartment, was in fact a variation of a design first proposed for refuse removal by John Kelly back in 1909. This type of truck, in various forms, would become a staple of the DSNY by decades end. The demonstrator unit shown in the photos on this page looks exactly like the vehicle depicted in his patent drawings. It may have been a working prototype, from which he drew up a patent after successful testing. Unfortunately for Goodman, the department was not quite ready to take the leap into mechanization at the time, opting instead for hand-loaded, enclosed bodies. When the DSNY finally designed and built their own conveyor loader in 1937, Goodman filed an application for reinstatement of a similar patent which he had abandoned in 1931. This may have indicated he was vying for City contracts, or perhaps intended to defend his intellectual property.     Despite having never achieved any great sales or notoriety, Goodman deserves credit for pioneering the enclosed escalator-loader design, in the form in which it would one day dominate the DSNY fleet. Goodman almost certainly would have pitched his design to the Department in 1931, so it's probably no coincidence that the conveyor loader that the DSNY's Loron Kurtz and Carl Ottoson later created was so similar. The only real difference was in the power drive for the conveyor, which was simplified in the Department's version, and was adopted in 1937. From there, the DSNY's love affair with conveyor loaders would last until the end of the Roto-Pac era in the early 1970s. Heil Company sold many more of their own similar design to the cities of Chicago and Milwaukee. Automatic Truck Loader Corporation, along with ATIA and Colecto, formed a trio of New York-based companies dedicated to refuse body construction, the first of their kind in the nation. For all their pioneering efforts, none of them ever won any large contracts with the area's biggest municipal fleet, the DSNY. The larger, national body builders like Gar Wood, Heil, and Leach dominated the midwest markets, and much of what was leftover in the east. The small independents, innovative as they often were, didn't have much of a chance. It must have been difficult for Goodman to see his home town flooded with hundreds of refuse trucks so similar in function and appearance to his own design.     Not much is known of Joseph Goodman or ATL. It is pure speculation, but he may have been related to the Goodman Company of Chicago, which was a major manufacturer of mining equipment, since conveyor loaders are used in coal processing. He applied for and was granted a third refuse loader patent in 1946, for a revised version with a shortened conveyor run, but it is doubtful that it was ever built. Incredibly, there remains to this day a "paper trail" for Automatic Truck Loader Corporation, which is still listed as active by the State of New York, with a founding date of 1930. However, Delaware records show the ATL charter as having been revoked in 1935 for non-payment of taxes. The physical building is still standing as well, at 612 West 52nd street, in New York. In recent years, it returned to use as a stable for carriage horses, having been purchased and operated through a cooperative of horse-drawn cab operators. Few Manhattanites are probably aware that the west side building was the birthplace of the the City's first mechanized sanitation truck. January 10, 2016 Automatic Truck Loader demo shown with body hoisted. Cables lifted tailgate as body was raised Goodman patent drawing of 1931 looks exactly like demonstrator model, including the Mack truck chassis. A rotary blade (44) was designed to fitted to break up hardened snow, prior to loading on to conveyor SELECTED PATENTS Patent # Description Inventor Assignee Date US945330 Vehicle Kelly January 27, 1909 US1915927A Refuse Truck Goodman Automatic Truck Loader Corp September 26, 1931 US2103112A Refuse Truck Goodman Automatic Truck Loader Corp July 31, 1937 US2494171A Refuse Truck Goodman Automatic Truck Loader Corp June 28, 1946 REFERENCES State of Delaware: Executive Department Proclamation (Gov. C.D. Buck, January 19, 1935) Untapped Cities: Behind the Scenes in the Clinton Park Horse Stables.. (Michelle Young, January 16, 2014) New York Daily News: City Carriage Horse Stable Owners in Crisis... (Katherine Clarke, December 6, 2014) Classic Refuse Trucks: DSNY Escalator-Loader Refuse Collection Body (Eric Voytko, July 30, 2014) 1/10/16 © 2016 All Rights Reserved Logos shown are the trademarks of respective manufacturers Photos from factory brochures/trade advertisements except as noted