Caterpillar Vin Year

[Sherley]

Ina time when horses powered infrastructure and agriculture, Caterpillar co-founders Benjamin Holt and C.L. Best created products that transformed the way our customers worked. Holt invented a steam tractor in 1890 to keep farmers working longer than horses could. Best responded to customer needs with a focus on early gasoline technology.

Benjamin Holt is standing in front of his experimental gasoline powered track-type tractor. Quickly realizing the limitation of steam power, Benjamin Holt built an experimental gasoline tractor in 1906.

Although the company was feeling the effects of the Great Depression, Caterpillar invested in products and technologies that are still important to our business today. We expanded our product line to offer more solutions to build, power and connect the world, including the first true motor grader (the auto patrol).

Today, Cat engines are commonly found in electric power generation. Other uses for Cat power include engines for the petroleum industry, marine, locomotives, agricultural equipment, industrial power, construction equipment and many more. The diesel engine's virtues of efficiency, dependability and simplicity were what prompted Caterpillar to pioneer its use in mobile equipment sixty years ago. These same attributes are characteristic of the Cat engines of today.

The elevated sprocket tractor keeps the drive mechanism out of the dirt, is easier to maintain and more efficient, trouble-free operation. Pictured: D10 development team with the first production model.

Customers continued to rely on us to develop innovative solutions to get the work done. Since our earliest days, Caterpillar has provided products and services that benefit our customers, continually improving the quality of the environment and communities where we live and work while helping build a better, more sustainable world. From early autonomy with remote-controlled machines to today's fully-autonomous vehicles, we have continued to bring innovative solutions that have helped our customers succeed.

The post-World War II construction boom in the U.S., Europe and Asia translated into rapid growth and led to Caterpillar expanding our operations around the globe to better serve our customers. In the 1950s, we started creating overseas subsidiaries to manufacture our machines and parts for local markets. At that time, we became a multinational company, and our equipment was at work on every continent, including Antarctica.

To help our customer build a better world and meet the needs of a global population, we focused on growing our business through a series of acquisitions to further diversify our products and service offerings.

Founded in 1952, the Caterpillar Foundation has been transforming communities to be stronger, more resilient and more sustainable. The Foundation has made a tremendous impact on global disaster relief efforts around the world through financial support of organizations like the Red Cross, a longstanding partner for nearly 70 years.

Caterpillar Inc., also known as Cat, is an American construction, mining and other engineering equipment manufacturer.[6] The company is the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment.[3][7][8]In 2018, Caterpillar was ranked number 73 on the Fortune 500 list[9] and number 265 on the Global Fortune 500 list.[10] Caterpillar stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.[11]

Caterpillar Inc. traces its origins to the 1925 merger of the Holt Manufacturing Company and the C. L. Best Tractor Company, creating a new entity, California-based Caterpillar Tractor Company.[12] In 1986, the company reorganized itself as a Delaware corporation under the current name, Caterpillar Inc. It announced in January 2017 that over the course of that year, it would relocate its headquarters from Peoria, Illinois, to Deerfield, Illinois, scrapping plans from 2015 of building an $800 million new headquarters complex in downtown Peoria.[13][14] Its headquarters are located in Irving, Texas, since 2022.[15][16]

The company also licenses and markets a line of clothing and workwear boots under its Cat / Caterpillar name.[17][18] Additionally, the company licenses the Cat phone brand of toughened mobile phones and rugged smartphones since 2012.[19] Caterpillar machinery and other company-branded products are recognizable by their trademark "Caterpillar Yellow" livery and the "CAT" logo.[20]

The company traces its roots to the steam tractor machines manufactured by the Holt Manufacturing Company in 1890.[21] The steam tractors of the 1890s and early 1900s were extremely heavy, sometimes weighing 1,000 pounds (450 kg) per horsepower, and often sank into the earth of the San Joaquin Valley Delta farmland surrounding Stockton, California.[22] Benjamin Holt attempted to fix the problem by increasing the size and width of the wheels up to 7.5 feet (2.3 m) tall and 6 feet (1.8 m) wide, producing a tractor 46 feet (14 m) wide, but this also made the tractors increasingly complex, expensive, and difficult to maintain.

Another solution considered was to lay a temporary plank road ahead of the steam tractor, but this was time-consuming, expensive, and interfered with earthmoving. Holt thought of wrapping the planks around the wheels.[22] He replaced the wheels on a 40 horsepower (30 kW) Holt steamer, No. 77, with a set of wooden tracks bolted to chains. On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1904, he successfully tested the updated machine plowing the soggy delta land of Roberts Island.[23]

Contemporaneously, Richard Hornsby & Sons in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England, developed a steel plate-tracked vehicle, which it patented in 1904.[24] This tractor was the first to be steered using differential braking of the tracks, eliminating the forward tiller and steering wheel. Several tractors were made and sold to operate in the Yukon, one example of which was in operation until 1927, and remnants of it still exist. Hornsby found a limited market for their tractor, so they sold their patent to Holt five years after its development.[25]

Company photographer Charles Clements, looking at the machine's upside-down image through his camera lens, commented that the track rising and falling over the carrier rollers looked like a caterpillar,[26][27] and Holt seized on the metaphor. "Caterpillar it is. That's the name for it!"[23] Some sources, though, attribute this name to British soldiers who had witnessed trials of the Hornsby tractor in July 1907. Two years later, Holt sold his first steam-powered tractor crawlers for US$5,500, about US$185,000 in 2024. Each side featured a track frame measured 30 inches (760 mm) high by 42 inches (1,100 mm) wide and were 9 feet (2.7 m) long. The tracks were 3 inches (76 mm) by 4 inches (100 mm) redwood slats.[23]

Holt received the first patent for a practical continuous track for use with a tractor on December 7, 1907, for his improved "Traction Engine" ("improvement in vehicles, and especially of the traction engine class; and included endless traveling platform supports upon which the engine is carried").[28]

On February 2, 1910,[27] Holt opened up a plant in East Peoria, Illinois, led by his nephew Pliny Holt. There, Pliny met farm implement dealer Murray Baker, who knew of an empty factory that had been recently built to manufacture farm implements and steam traction engines. Baker, who later became the first executive vice president of what became Caterpillar Tractor Company, wrote to Holt headquarters in Stockton and described the plant of the bankrupt Colean Manufacturing Co. of East Peoria.On October 25, 1909, Pliny Holt purchased the factory,[30] and immediately began operations with 12 employees.[31] Holt incorporated it as the Holt Caterpillar Company, although he did not trademark the name Caterpillar until August 2, 1910.[27]

The addition of a plant in the Midwest, despite the hefty capital needed to retool the plant, proved so profitable that only two years later, the company employed 625 people and was exporting tractors to Argentina, Canada, and Mexico.[32] Tractors were built in both Stockton and East Peoria.[33][34]

On January 31, 2017, the company announced plans to move their headquarters from Peoria to Deerfield, Illinois, by the end of 2017.[35] The new location at 500 Lake Cook Road is the former site of a Fiatallis plant that manufactured wheel loaders for many years.

On June 14, 2022, the company announced plans to move its global headquarters from Deerfield, Illinois, to Irving, Texas, beginning later in the year, citing "the best strategic interest of the company."[36]

The first tanks used in WWI were manufactured by William Foster & Co., also in Lincolnshire, England, and were introduced to the battlefield in 1916. That company had collaborated with Hornsby in the development of the vehicles demonstrated to the British military in 1907, providing the paraffin (kerosene) engines.

Holt's track-type tractors played a support role in World War I. Even before the U.S. formally entered WWI, Holt had shipped 1,200 tractors to England, France, and Russia for agricultural purposes. These governments, however, sent the tractors directly to the battlefront, where the military put them to work hauling artillery and supplies.[37] When World War I broke out, the British War Office ordered a Holt tractor and put it through trials at Aldershot. The War Office was suitably impressed and chose it as a gun tractor.[38] Over the next four years, the Holt tractor became a major artillery tractor, mainly used to haul medium guns such as the 6-inch howitzer, the 60-pounder, and later the 9.2-inch howitzer.[39]

Holt tractors had become well known during World War I. Military contracts formed the major part of the company's production. When the war ended, Holt's planned expansion to meet the military's needs was abruptly terminated. The heavy-duty tractors needed by the military were unsuitable for farmers. The company's situation worsened when artillery tractors were returned from Europe, depressing prices for new equipment and Holt's unsold inventory of military tractors. The company struggled with the transition from wartime boom to peacetime bust. To keep the company afloat, they borrowed heavily.

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