"The little-known secrets behind the men & women who shaped America"

2 tractor builders paved the way for worldwide construction industry

By Paul Niemann

[November 06, 2008]  Benjamin Holt and Daniel Best. Two Californians who created two entirely different types of tractors. One of the men created the tractor design on which military tanks are based.

Dan Best operated the Best Tractor Company with his son in San Leandro, Calif., during the early 1900s. Meanwhile, Ben Holt ran the Holt Manufacturing Company in Stockton, Calif., also in the early 1900s.

There were periods when Holt worked for Best, but each time they would go back to being competitors. They would eventually merge their two companies into a new company that now has operations all over the world, yet very few people have ever heard of these two men.

The type of tractor that Holt and Best built their company around is the result of combining their tractor designs. Holt developed the world's first steam track-type tractor in 1904, while Best developed the world's first gas track-type tractor in 1906. Best's tractor imitated the movement of a certain insect as it crawled along the ground. What type of insect?

A caterpillar. As in the Caterpillar Tractor Co., which Holt and Best created in 1925. Headquartered in Peoria, Caterpillar sells more than $30 billion in construction equipment each year.

And just how did they come up with the name of Caterpillar?

A photographer working for Holt was taking pictures of one of the tractors one day when he noticed that the track rotating over its rollers looked like the movement of a caterpillar. Holt agreed, and that's how the Caterpillar brand name was born.

But their story doesn't end here. Have you ever noticed how military tanks use a crawler-type track?

During World War I, before Holt and Best merged to form Caterpillar, Holt's company produced the Holt Crawler. While you've probably never heard of the Holt Crawler unless you're a really serious history buff, the Holt Crawler is what provided the inspiration for the first tanks used in the war. To this day, tanks use Holt's type of crawler-type track.

Despite the fact that Caterpillar is No. 1 in sales of crawler-type tractors, neither Ben Holt nor Dan Best created the machine's original design. Holt purchased two patents in the early 1900s that represented the forerunner to Caterpillar's earliest tractor.

While Caterpillar is famous for its bulldozers, it wasn't the first company to attach the bulldozer blade to the machine that powers it. No one knows which company pioneered that idea, and Caterpillar didn't even produce the first real bulldozers. In the days before tractors, the original "bulldozers" were the pairs of mules that would pull the blade into piles of dirt. That worked fine until the operator tried to put the mules in reverse!

[By PAUL NIEMANN]

Paul Niemann's column is syndicated to more than 70 newspapers. He is the author of the "Invention Mysteries" series of books. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Copyright Paul Niemann 2008

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