The Liebherr group is celebrating the 70th birthday of its first ever mobile tower crane.
Hans Liebherr designed the mobile tower crane in 1949, during the rebuilding process in Germany and Europe.
At the time, construction workers had to manually load stones, mortar cement and bricks from trucks to build apartments and factories.
In post-war Germany, there were few cranes as they were mostly made out of heavy steel and iron, leading to lengthy assembly times.
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Hans Liebherr designed the first Liebherr tower crane, the TK 10, to be easy to transport and fast to erect. He registered his invention with the German Patent Office, which issued the patent on 19 August 1949.
The TK 10 took two to three hours to assemble, which was considerably faster than other cranes at the time which could take several days to erect.
The modern successor to the TK 10 is the fast-erecting crane 125 K. It has little in common with its original ancestor, apart from the concept. It has a 55 metre jib height and a maximum hook length of 65.5 metres, significantly outperforming its TK 10 ancestor.