Columbus, Indiana — The survival of the Cummins Engine Company came down to a stunt in a banker’s office. The year was 1930, the bank was threatening to liquidate the firm, and Clessie Cummins answered by installing the first diesel engine in a passenger car and driving the thing over to demonstrate it. The banker was intrigued. The business lived. Follow the money in this company’s early decades and you keep finding the same mechanism: engineering converted into spectacle, spectacle into confidence, confidence into credit.
The mechanics here began with a farm boy obsessed with engines. Cummins was building his first steam engine by age 11, left the family farm to work as a mechanic, and in 1911 talked his way onto Ray Harroun’s pit crew for a local race after suggesting ways to improve speed, and that car went on to win the first-ever Indianapolis 500. In 1919, funded by the banker William G. Irwin, he founded the Cummins Engine Company in Columbus, building on technology the German engineer Rudolf Diesel had developed in the late 1800s.
Showmanship As Balance Sheet
The catch is that the engineering alone did not sell. Cummins drove it to the New York Auto Show, roughly 800 miles away, on $1.38 worth of gas, set the first diesel speed records at Daytona Beach at 80.398 mph and then 100.75, and in 1931 put a diesel in the Indianapolis 500, where Dave Evans drove No. 8 the full distance without a pit stop, finishing twelfth. There was a 2-week, day-and-night marathon around the Speedway in a diesel truck that covered 13,535 miles — after which, he later admitted, his endurance was never the same. Years earlier, in 1912, he had already run a home-made 16-foot boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
Contemporaries clocked the effect. One Indianapolis businessman, quoted in The Engine That Could, put it this way: “one couldn’t resist Mr. Cummins’ whole-hearted enthusiasm.” His brother and colleague Don put it more plainly: “It was fun…we did it because it had to be done.”
What The Son Saw
Lyle Cummins, who wrote The Diesel Odyssey of Clessie Cummins and worked for his father late in the older man’s career, counted 33 US patents awarded over nearly 50 years and five world records, by truck, by bus and by race car. he wrote: “Dad was a genius who turned ideas into products, and then created a market for them.” He also noted that the record attempts ruined his father’s health.
The early years were near-death more than once; as one book excerpt puts it, “the saving fact was that W.G. Irwin and Clessie never weakened at the same time.” Under J. Irwin Miller, the banker’s great-nephew, the firm rose over four decades into a Fortune 500 engine maker still headquartered in Columbus. In his autobiography he summed up the job: “The endeavor I undertook demanded invention, showmanship and faith in an idea.” He closed with wonder: “What a privilege, being on hand at the royal birth and throughout the exciting years that followed.”
His products never quite reached the family automobile — the catch that kept the diesel out of Detroit’s showrooms — yet, as Hemmings’ Jim Donnelly judged, “Cummins was brilliant. His products were terrific.” The man who became the American highway’s godfather of diesel power built his market one record, one race and one astonished banker at a time.
Sources
- Clessie Cummins | Founder of Cummins in Columbus, Indiana | Visit Columbus Indiana
- The History of the Cummins Diesel Engine | RealTruck
