Caterpillar got its name from a photographer peering at a tractor
Steam tractors kept sinking into the soft farmland around Stockton, California. Benjamin Holt's fix was to swap the wheels for wooden tracks bolted to chains, first tested on Thanksgiving Day 1904. Watching the tracks ripple over the rollers, a company photographer said the machine looked like a caterpillar, and the name stuck.
Holt's steam engines could weigh 1,000 pounds per horsepower. Giant wheels, some 7.5 feet tall, only made them costlier and harder to maintain, and laying planks ahead of them was slow. So on 24 November 1904 Holt ploughed the soggy ground of Roberts Island with his No. 77 steamer running on wooden tracks. Photographer Charles Clements supplied the metaphor, though some credit British soldiers who watched a rival tracked tractor from Hornsby of Lincolnshire; Holt later bought that firm's patent. His own patent for a practical continuous track came in December 1907.
A plant in East Peoria, bought by his nephew Pliny in 1909 from a bankrupt maker, grew from 12 workers to 625 within two years. War made Holt tractors famous: the British Army adopted them to haul artillery, and they helped inspire the first tanks, which an English firm built. But peace left Holt with unsellable military machines and heavy debts, while its competitor C. L. Best had thrived supplying farmers with smaller tractors.
The two rivals had spent about $1.5 million suing each other between 1907 and 1918. On a financier's advice they merged in 1925 as the Caterpillar Tractor Company, with Clarence Leo Best in charge until 1951. The new firm moved to diesel engines and found fame in the Second World War with the Navy's Seabees, who used its machines to build Pacific airfields. It launched its first overseas venture in 1950.
Now the world's biggest maker of construction equipment and part of the Dow Jones index, Caterpillar is known everywhere by its yellow paint. It left Peoria for Deerfield in 2017 and moved its headquarters again, to Irving in Texas, in 2022.
Source: Caterpillar Inc.
