Caterpillar Inc History

The beginning of the history of Caterpillar Inc dates to the late 1890s and the early 1900, two competitors Daniel Best and Benjamin Holt were individually experimenting with ways to improve the traction of the popular steam tractor, used in the farming in California's Central Valley. The Steam tractor back then was extremely heavy and often sank in soft earth. A solution came when Holt thought of wrapping planks around the wheels of the tractor, he later successfully tested the updated machine. A company employee observed that the tractor crawled like a caterpillar, which immediately caught the attention of Holt.

Holt track-type tractors play a support role in World War I. Even before the U.S. Formally entered the conflict, Holt shipped 1,200 tractors to England, France and Russia for agricultural purposes. Despite not being designed by combat engineering, these governments sent the tractors directly to the battlefront to assist the men fighting.

The Caterpillar Company can trace it origins to the 1925 merger of the Holt Manufacturing Company and the C. L. Best Tractor Company, creating a new entity, the California based Caterpillar Tractor Company. In the 1986, the company re-organized it self as a Delaware corporation under the current name, Caterpillar Inc. Their headquarters are located in Peoria, Il. The Caterpillar Inc Heavy Equipment is recognizable by its trademark "Caterpillar Yellow" livery and the "CAT" logo.

The company consolidated its product line adopting the Cat Diesel Engines, Caterpillar Engines, Construction machines (construction machinery such as the excavator, backhoe loader and the bulldozer to give some examples), Caterpillar heavy equipment and more.

The business lines for the Caterpillar Inc company has a list of some 400 products of Cat Equipment and Cat Engine Parts, available for purchase through the cat dealers network in virtually almost every country in the world.