Caterpillar Growth

Caterpillar grew out of the 1925 consolidation of two California agricultural equipment manufactures, Holt Manufacturing Company of Stockton, California and the C. L. Best Gas Traction Company of San Leandro, California. But the story starts much earlier. The president of Holt Manufacturing Company, Benjamin Holt, entered the twentieth century producing a variety of agricultural equipment. This equipment included combine harvesters and the steam traction engines designed to pull them through the fields. The extremely heavy steam traction engines, sometimes weighing 1,000 lbs per horsepower, often sank in the rich, soft earth of the San Joaquin valley, presenting a seemingly insolvable problem.

Enormous wheels were tried in an unworkable effort to lower the ground pressure enough to keep these cast iron behemoths from sinking. The solution came on November 24th, 1904 when Benjamin Holt tested the first practical crawler tractor. He removed the rear drive wheels from a 40 horsepower Holt Junior Road Engine Number 77 and replaced them with a pair of tracks nine feet long and two feet wide.

Benjamin Holt was a compulsive tinkerer who could spend hours in his shops trying out his latest ideas. The development of the first Holt crawler tractor was the culmination of several years of work on the part of not only the Holt staff, but also on the part of Benjamin Holt himself.

In 1908, Holt introduced gasoline power for his tiller wheel crawlers. The Holt Company manufactured their own gasoline engines at the original "engine division," the Aurora Engine Company, (named after Aurora Street in Stockton where it was located), a subsidiary company set up for that purpose. The gasoline engines offered a great improvement over steam in both the power-to-weight ratio and in a reduction in the manpower required to operate the tractor. The steam engines of the day often required a crew of seven, one of which had to be a highly skilled, and paid, licensed "farm engineer." The engineer would rise in the middle of the night to start the fire in the boiler to get up steam by first light. The traction engine boiler had an insatiable appetite for water and either coal or wood to convert it to steam. The crew had to work all day just to keep it fed.

In 1910 the Stockton plant manager, Clarence Leo Best, left Holt to resurrect his father's old tractor company which had been bought by Holt in 1908. He called the reestablished company the C.L. Best Gas Traction Company. Much to the chagrin of Benjamin Holt, Best would introduce a crawler tractor in 1913 that was patterned after a Holt design. During the First World War, while Holt was busy filling large military orders, Best would concentrate on the domestic market for smaller agricultural tractors, gaining ground on Holt.

Daniel Best followed a business career similar in many ways to Benjamin Holt's. Daniel Best also got his start in agriculture by manufacturing portable grain cleaners. He eventually branched out into steam traction engines, combines and gasoline-powered wheel tractors. Although always smaller than Holt, Best kept up a spirited competition between them in the Western markets.

In 1910, Daniel's son, C. L. Best, left his job at Holt as San Leandro's plant manager and resurrected a Best Tractor Company. It was this company, the C.L. Best Gas Traction Company, that merged with Holt Caterpillar in 1925 to become the Caterpillar Tractor Co. with C.L. Best as CEO, where he would remain until October of 1951.

As war swept through Europe in August of 1914, the phenomenal pulling power of crawler tractors attracted the attention of military men. Prior to the American entry into the war, thousands of crawler tractors were sold to the Allies. The Allies used the crawlers in place of horses to haul artillery. They were also used by the Quartermaster Corps of the belligerents to haul long trains of freight wagons over the unimproved dirt tracks behind the front. The Holt Crawler also provided the inspiration for the first tanks. Because of the similarity, many people ask if Caterpillar ever produced tanks. Actually, the Holt Manufacturing Company did, they produced two. The first one was also the very first tank made in the United States.

In addition to tanks, Holt also produced the world's first self-propelled artillery. Holt's self-propelled 75 mm gun could travel at the unheard of speed of 28 miles per hour. The idea, however, was too radical and would not catch on until World War II. Finally, in 1925, Holt and Best merged, forming the Caterpillar Tractor Co. with C.L. Best as CEO.