Short answers, pulled from the story.
A shovel is a tool used for digging, lifting, and moving bulk materials such as soil, coal, gravel, snow, sand, or ore. Most shovels are hand tools consisting of a broad blade fixed to a medium-length handle. They are commonly used in agriculture and in archaeology to locate and excavate subsurface dirt.
Shovel blades are usually made of sheet steel or hard plastics and are very strong. Handles are usually made of wood, especially varieties such as ash or maple, or glass-reinforced plastic known as fiberglass. The handles are usually riveted in place.
In the Neolithic age and earlier, a large animal's scapula, or shoulder blade, was often used as a crude shovel or spade. At that time shovels were often used for farming.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, a developer of scientific management, studied shoveling because manual labor was central and costly in late 19th and early 20th century industry. Working in the 1890s through the 1910s, he and his colleagues expanded the idea of different-sized shovel scoops matched to each material's density, so the same shovel was no longer used for brown coal one day and gravel the next.
No, front-end loaders and excavators are not classified as shovels, even though they perform similar digging, lifting, and moving work. They descend from steam shovels, but the term shovel does apply to larger excavating machines called power shovels.
Types of shovels include the coal shovel, snow shovel, snow scoop or sleigh shovel, grain or barn shovel, spoon shovel, roofing shovel, square shovel, scoop, and the drain spade or trenching shovel. Each is shaped for a specific task, such as the trenching shovel's long thin blade with upturned side flanges used for digging trenches.