The 1930s was a time of crisis in North America: the Great Depression. Adding to this unprecedented economic crisis was a terrible wave of drought and dust storms that hit prairie farmland in Canada and the United States (the Dust Bowl).
As the world’s economic powers faltered, a brand new company born of the merger of the Holt Manufacturing Company and C.L. Best Tractor Co. took advantage of the crisis in order to innovate. Caterpillar was founded in 1925, but the crisis of the 1930s would forever mark the DNA of the brand, leading to new inventions. The following examples show that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and Caterpillar embodies this proverb.
The very first true motor grader was a Caterpillar invention (main picture)! In 1931, Cat launched this stand-alone machine, the Auto Patrol 9. Previously, graders were horse-drawn, then utilized crawler tracks. Note the engine at the rear to improve the balance and efficiency of the equipment, and the rubber tires (Caterpillar photo archive).
The evolution of the Auto Patrol 9 launched in the late 1930s, the Auto Patrol 12 is a revolutionary grader for its time, providing great freedom of movement of the blades and unprecedented power with its 6 diesel cylinders and 66 horsepower. The Auto Patrol 12 still exists today after 80 years of uninterrupted service in its modern form, the Cat 140 (12M) and its 184 horsepower (Caterpillar photo archive).
The 1930s saw Caterpillar’s transition to diesel power with the development of the Cat Diesel Sixty, affectionately known as “Old Betsy,” and the D9900, the brand’s first diesel engine. A true piece of American history, Old Betsy can still be seen at the Peoria Riverfront Museum in the state of Illinois (Caterpillar photo archive).
Unfortunately, the company was not spared by the economic crisis. In 1932, Caterpillar announced record losses of $1.6 million ($31 million in today’s dollars). However, its revolutionary D17000 diesel engine (1935) that succeeded “Old Betsy” saved the company and remained in production for almost 50 years! At the end of the decade, Caterpillar was the largest producer of diesel engines in the world (Caterpillar photo archive)!
In 1933, the new president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, proposed a way out of the economic crisis. His “New Deal” would put millions of unemployed and often homeless Americans back to work through a public works program. It was a time of huge construction sites that demanded Caterpillar expertise, as here with the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco (inaugurated in 1937) with the Cat 631B in the foreground (Caterpillar photo archive)!
What allowed Caterpillar to survive and prosper in the 1930s is also the strength of the brand’s equipment: reliability, durability, and the ability to offer innovative, bold products that meet the real needs of its customers.
This ongoing quest for excellence and efficiency in serving our industries continues to this day with new technologies and research in the electric motors powering Cat equipment.