Cummins bet on the young diesel engine and waited years to win
Cummins began in 1919 in Columbus, Indiana, pairing a banker's money with a mechanic's faith in the diesel engine, invented just 20 years before. Real commercial success did not come until 1933. Today the company sells in about 190 countries and territories through roughly 7,200 dealers.
Mechanic Clessie Cummins and banker William Glanton Irwin founded the Cummins Engine Company on 3 February 1919. Well-publicised endurance trials drew attention, but the first real hit was the Model H of 1933, fitted to small railroad switching locomotives. Late in the 1950s Clessie Cummins came up with the engine brake, selling it on to Jacobs for production in 1961; Cummins bought that brake business back in 2022.
Growth came partly through purchases. Cummins took over the British turbocharger maker Holset in 1973, and its turbos still carry the Holset name, although the division became Cummins Turbo Technologies in 2006. It acquired the generator maker Onan between 1986 and 1992, and in 1999 bought the exhaust after-treatment firm Nelson Industries as emissions rules grew more demanding.
A 5.9-litre Cummins straight-six has gone into heavy-duty Dodge Ram pickups since 1988, joined by a 6.7-litre option in 2007. Its Indian business opened on 17 February 1962 as a partnership with the Kirloskar Group, and Cummins raised its stake to 51 percent in 1997. By 2013 its Indian arm earned more than $1.5 billion from 20 factories with 9,000 employees, and a technical centre in Pune now houses over 2,500 engineers. Cummins India also founded a women-only engineering college in that city.
Diesel is no longer the whole story. In April 2013 Cummins began shipping large natural gas engines as American trucking fleets switched part of their vehicles over, and in March 2023 it renamed its New Power unit Accelera, which builds hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, electric axles and electrolysers. In China, a joint venture with Foton developed an engine platform in the mid-2010s that now tops 240,000 units a year.
Source: Cummins
