A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining. The history of heavy equipment and excavators reaches even earlier times. Earth-moving tools and bucket wheels go back to ancient times, while the first known excavator design came in around 1420. Before the use of BWE, the first documented use of a bucket chain excavator was in 1859 by Alphonse Couvreux, a French entrepreneur. This paper presents some notes on the history of BWEs, starting from the first construction of the rail-mounted BWE, which was first put into operation in 1916, in the surface mine Bergwitz in Germany to the Guinness World Record for the heaviest land-based vehicle ever built: The gigantic Bagger 293 weighting 14,200 tones, a BWE built in 1995 used for strip-mining operations. This heaviest earthmoving machine, with the digging output of 240,000 m3 per day, is capable of moving under its own power. Historical development and evolution of BWEs led to the enormous increase of the output of those machines over the next years.