Word: catting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Botts in Africa. This well-fed, big-sinewed Cat had grown from a kitten bred in 1904 by Ben Holt of Stockton, Calif. Some of the farms around Stockton were marshy, and Holt spent years trying to build a tractor that wouldn't bog down in them. He designed one that would move on a track and pick it up and lay it down as it went-the first Caterpillar. As demand for the new-fangled invention spread east, Holt opened a branch plant in East Peoria. That became the main plant after the Holt Manufacturing Co. merged with...
...years later Ted Farley, now Cat's vice president in charge of special projects, went to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He found some Englishmen working a cotton field with a dragline plow operated by a gasoline engine. Like Botts, he had Cat ship him a couple of its prize tractors. But by the time he got to the plantation, the Englishmen were using a German-made diesel engine-and had slashed their costs...
Farley sent Cat a cable asking what he should do, and was told to "Proceed immediately to the Daimler-Benz engine plant in Germany and look at their engines." He brought back five different models. From them and others collected from all over the world, Cat perfected its own diesel. By the late 19303, Cat's diesels had replaced their gasoline engines...
Boss in Peoria. But big Cat hit its fastest pace after 1941, when Louis Bontz Neumiller stepped into its $75,000-a-year presidency. Unlike Earthworm's whip-cracking President Gilbert Henderson, Neumiller is a surprisingly mild-looking, soft-spoken man-a moderator more than a boss. As his friend Author Upson puts it, Neumiller "just sort of grew up with the company." He started at 19, as an engineering clerk ("I always tried to get the desk nearest the boss's door"), worked up through drafting-room superintendent, parts manager, service manager, sales executive, and, after...
Neumiller took over the big job just when Government and Army ordnance people were suggesting that Cat convert to ordnance manufacture. But Neumiller stubbornly said he knew better; the Army would need his earth-moving equipment far more than anything else he could learn to make. He was right. Cat turned out almost $500 million worth of equipment, including bulldozers. During most of the war, bulldozers were needed so badly that they had the same Double-A priority as tanks and planes...