Your Position: Home - Machinery - The History and Power of the Trusted Bulldozer
Pushing dirt is not a job for the faint of heart. If you’ve ever had a minor digging task in your backyard, you know that breaking soil, digging, and moving it from one place to another can be back-breaking work—certainly enough to get you a nice sunburn and sore arms for the rest of the week. When dealing with complex terrain and big mounds of dirt, things get even spicier.
A cubic yard of soil can weigh up to 2,2000 lbs and even more if saturated. It’s why the heavy machinery used in construction sites made history and changed the efficiency and capabilities of what and how we build. The bulldozer is one of these recognizable beasts of a machine that does the heavy lifting in many construction jobs. So where did this tractor come from?
A Lesson From Mother Nature and the Origin of the Term “Bulldoze”
When used in the common vernacular, when you “bulldoze” someone, it usually means running over them or pushing through them by force. The term actually comes from the tendency of bulls out in the wild. An alpha bull will playfully push around the smaller, less imposing bulls. Hence, the term “bully.” Come mating season, the playful aspect turns to more serious business and becomes more about asserting dominance and establishing power to win the mates.
The Predecessors of the Bulldozer Blade
We now associate the term bulldozer with the vehicle that includes the blade and the engine, but the bulldozer more specifically refers to the blade itself. Early in the 1900s, inventors across continents were looking to find ways to improve construction projects and excavation equipment. Industrialism and cities were expanding and growing, creating a demand for more complex infrastructure and construction.
The bulldozer was essentially the union between early versions of tractors and the bulldozer blade. The blade component was not a new invention, as it had been used in agriculture and other construction when it was mounted to the front and harnessed to two mules or oxen.
The Role of the Bulldozer and Why It’s a Favorite for the Job
A bulldozer is a type of tractor that is set apart by the metal plate mounted in its front. It’s like a linebacker, it will come at you with extraordinary power push back whatever is in its way. The bulldozer is used to push debris, raw material, rock, dirt, and soil and do so through the power harnessed by the engine and tracking system.
The rotating tracks around the bottom function as a sustaining element. They are a source of power that provides the dozer with incredible stability and resilience. At the same time, it gives the vehicle the ability to traverse across uneven and rough terrain, while maintaining its pushing abilities.
What Gives the Dozer the Power of the Bull?
The ripper and blade are part of what differentiates this machine from the regular farming tractor. The blade or “plate” is the metal structure mounted on the front of the vehicle that does most of the pushing. The ripper is what breaks or “rips” the ground or raw material. It is located on the back end of the machine. The purpose of the ripper is to soften the soil and get it to a more workable state. Its claw-like shape makes the job easier.
What Are the Main Functions of a Bulldozer?
These powerful vehicles will be found in various sites including demolition sites, construction sites, and more. This is no one-trick pony! The bulldozer is an essential part of new home construction or the clearing of all sites.
This heavy lifter is often used in:
Cleaning up construction sites for new buildings, both residential and commercial. Before building begins, the foundation needs to be on solid ground. This might mean clearing out debris, vegetation, or evening the ground itself.
This heavy vehicle is very useful in setting the ground for a new road and or pavement.
A bulldozer can be a very handy vehicle on demolition sites. It is used to get rid of the leftover or raw material.
As desert dwellers here in El Paso, we know all too well how fast weeds can spread and cause clutter in yards or land lots. If you want to clear those weeds in one fell swoop, a dozer is a good option.
Other uses for the bulldozer also include:
Tree clearing
Sand dunes
New pad leveling
Clearing mounds
The Right Bull for the Job
Here, at LB & Sons, we house several sizes of bulldozers that allow us to tackle different sizes of jobs more appropriately. Today’s favorite machines are often the Caterpillars. As the story goes, a photographer working for Benjamin Holt — a pioneer of the industry of tractors — looked at an upside-down image of the tractor and called it a caterpillar. Holt liked the name so much that he kept it.
Before long, the Caterpillar company was born from the merger of two major players in the industrial equipment field of the time: the Holt company and C.L Best Gas Tractor Co. Caterpillar bulldozers are trusted vehicles for any job. At LB & Sons, we have the trusted Cat D6, Cat D7, Cat D8.
The Trusted Name for Bulldozing Services in El Paso
Whether it’s for construction, demolition, or land clearing, LB & Sons has you covered with the right bulldozer.
Explore our bulldozer services. Call us today and find the right bull for the job!
The bulldozer.
What was it first?
A solution for farmers, or a solution for construction workers?
Although it’s unclear who actually invented the first bulldozer, the bulldozer shovel blade has been around long before the first motorized tractors. In fact, the first wooden blade bulldozers were mule-or- horse-powered and used to move dirt as well as smooth rough ground for planting fields…for farmers.
Some say the first bulldozer was invented in 1904 by Benjamin Holt who developed an endless chain tread for his steam engine. Around the same time, the Hornsby Company of England also patented their version of a bulldozer which was closer to what is known today as a bulldozer because it was steered by controlling power to each track.
Hornsby sold his patents to Holt around 1914. Even though some people refer to these inventions as bulldozers, they were actually crawlers, and not technically bulldozers.
Most people, however, give credit for the bulldozer invention to Kansas farmer James Cummings and draftsman J. Earl McLeod who created a scraper blade in 1923. Their patent, approved in 1925, was for a “scraper blade mounted forwardly of the tractor on a pair of pivoting arms which are linked to the sides of the tractor, e.g. bulldozers.”
“The tractor to which Cummings and McLeod attached their bulldozer blade was a wheeled farm tractor. From what I can gather, it came about because Cummings had won a contract to backfill a pipeline trench,” said Deas Plant, a specialist in earth-moving and construction plant operations. Plant, who grew up and lives in Brisbane, Australia, has been operating bulldozers for over 50 years.
“Neither of these inventors actually built a bulldozer,” said Plant. “They were simply track-laying traction engines,” Plant said. “The scraper blade in the front of the machine is technically the bulldozer, and the machine is referred to as a crawler tractor.”
Another contributor to the innovation of the bulldozer is LaPlant-Choate, who produced some of the first bulldozers and motor scrapers. “Some experts believe LaPlant-Choate Mfg. Co of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, first fitted a bulldozer blade to a track laying tractor,” Plant said, “producing the first bulldozer in regular commercial production.” The machine was used in the 1923 construction of the Dixie Highway in Kentucky.
LaPlant-Choate took its name from E.W. LePlant, who started the company in 1889 by moving houses and pulling tree stumps, and nephew Roy Choate, joined him in 1911. The company evolved into the business of manufacturing bulldozer and snow plow blades and other equipment, and was sold in 1952 to Allis-Chalmers.Eventually, it was The Caterpillar Tractor Company that came to dominate the bulldozer market. The company was formed in August, 1925, by the merger of Holt’s company and its major competitor, the C. L. Best Gas Tractor Company.
The Caterpillar name is attributed to a photographer hired by Holt to take pictures of one of his crawler tractors. The photographer noticed that the rollers looked like a caterpillar when he saw the image upside-down through his camera lens. Holt liked it, and the name stuck.
The history of the word “bulldozer” goes back to the 19th century when a bulldozer denoted a horizontal forging press used for shaping and bending metal. Another term, a bull-dose, was a large dose — literally effective for a bull — of any sort of medicine or punishment. Bull-dosing also meant coercion or intimidation. In the late 19th century, bulldozing meant using brute force to push over or through any obstacle, referring to two bulls butting heads in a fight. Today’s term might be a “bully.”
During World War 1, Holt crawler tractors were used extensively by both American and British forces as ‘beasts of burden’ hauling heavy artillery and other heavy loads around the front lines where no other vehicles could handle the muddy conditions, Plant noted. It was also during World War 1 that the first tracked armored tanks were developed and were first used in combat by the British Army in September, 1916.
In the late 1930s, the tracked vehicles became more common, and they became the go-to machine in the construction industry working on large projects like the building of Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge.
By the 1940s, the term bulldozer referred to the entire machine and not just the attachment.
Fleets of bulldozers were used in WWII to construct highways, runways and fortifications. Military bulldozers rumbled through bombed-out villages across Europe, working to clear roads and keep supply lines open, and rolled into camps as they were liberated by Allied forces. They were the first to go ashore on amphibious assaults, including the Normandy landings in 1944. Navy Admiral William Halsey said there were four things that helped win the war in the Pacific – airplanes, tanks, submarines and bulldozers.
Following the war, the bulldozer cleared the rubble of bombed cities, built roads and leveled farmland in Europe. When President Eisenhower enacted the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act, it meant the construction of the U.S. interstate system, and the bulldozer was center stage.
The 1950s was an era of rapid growth and construction in the United States, but those years were equally significant for large-scale destruction in the name of progress, according to Francesca Russello Ammon, in her 2016 book, Bulldozer. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, an ambitious system of interstate highways, and extensive urban renewal development, wrecking companies demolished buildings while earthmoving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented pace and scale, she writes.
Over the years, the bulldozer became an American icon. The size and sophistication of the machines grew, with the addition of automatic transmissions, hydraulic cylinders, electric motors, GPS technology and automatic grade control.
“The machine has changed a lot in the last almost 100 years,” Plant noted, “from an attachment on a wheeled farm tractor in 1923 to a fully integrated machine in 2020.”
“Many advances have been made over the years in bulldozer blade design and types, in crawler tractor design and in the design of controls for bulldozers. Horsepower has increased by well over 50 times and weights have likewise increased exponentially,” Plant said. “One can only wonder what Cummings and McLeod would think of today’s machines,” he said.
What started out as a solution for farmers eventually became a solution for the construction industry.
Today, this American icon is just a plain ‘ole “dozer.”
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