(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - When you ask someone who isn't from Central Illinois what pops in their mind when they hear "Peoria", chances are they will say, "Caterpillar."

The construction and mining equipment manufacturer is celebrating 100 years in business, and tonight we're looking at the history of Caterpillar, and the effect it's had on Central Illinois.

Lee Fosburgh is the manager of Caterpillar Corporate Archives, and Henry Vicary is the Director of Community Relations and Guest Services for Caterpillar.

Gentlemen, thanks for coming in, and congratulations on the big anniversary.

- Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

- Henry, we'll start with you.

You're a second generation Cat employee.

You grew up in Peoria.

What does it mean to you having this big milestone?

- When I think about Caterpillar, I think about people.

And I think about people like my dad who spent 36 years working with his hands in the factory at Caterpillar.

But my story is indicative of so many other thousands of families throughout this area.

I have relatives and friends who are fourth generation Caterpillar people.

And to me it's about people, great people at Caterpillar, helping our customers build a better world, and a more sustainable world.

And when I think about Caterpillar, I always go back to people.

- Mhm.

- And you've got one of the coolest jobs that I've ever heard of in doing research for this.

All the things, a million images in your archives, thousands of artifacts.

Let's talk about the beginning of this company.

And I guess when we talk about the beginning, the names Best and Holt- - [Lee] Sure.

- Come to mind.

Tell us a little bit about those gentlemen.

Well, you know, our history goes back even over a hundred years, and it goes back even in the Peoria area over a hundred years.

And what I always tell everyone, the archives came about just like kind of today, it was an anniversary, and the company was celebrating a book called "50 Years on Tracks", which was written by a gentleman called Byron Dahan, who eventually went on with a long career at Caterpillar.

And they were pulling the records together, right?

And then after the book was done, it's kinda like, what do you do with all these things?

What do you do with these treasures?

And what was done was really the formation of the first archives, which would've been in 1954.

- Mhm.

So the beginning of this company, I mean, it goes from horses and then goes to steam engines, engines.

Kind of give us an idea of how that started in the Peoria area and- - Sure.

- And how it started to grow in the '20s.

- So first, it really was a California story.

It was two families, one called Holt, and one called Best.

The Holt family really had the biggest impact on the Peoria area.

And so what they did was they first made farm implements that were pulled by horses.

But you know, you started to get what, you know, what you would call today, an energy transition that was moving to steam.

They created steam tractors.

And then they created gasoline tractors, which really put them on the map.

And these gasoline tractors, the story goes that they were called Caterpillars.

And it goes back to the steam tractor, Benjamin Holt on Thanksgiving Day.

You know, he must have been kind of a workaholic, right?

He took the wheels off of his tractor and put these, you know, tracks on.

The reason he did was, this area in California, which was Stockton, which is kind of closer to like the San Francisco-Bay Area.

It was an area that was really marshy, it had peat soil, and these big machines would sink in that.

So by putting these tracks on, it was really trying to make it better for the customer, which is really kind of our theme, right?

Today.

So when he went to gasoline, these machines were then called Caterpillars.

Holt never liked that name by the company photographer called the first machine a "giant caterpillar", which is kind of like an ironic part of the story, right?

The funny thing about Holt was, when Holt first heard this, right?

He hated the name, and his family members kinda worked on him.

He wanted to call it "Mudturtle" and a couple other names.

So think how our lives would be different, right, today, if we were, you know, the Mudturtles, so.

- Sounds like a minor league baseball team.

- Yeah.

- [Henry] It does.

- That's interesting.

Now...

But they stuck with the name, obviously.

And the logos have changed, and we don't have a actual Caterpillar in the logo these days.

- [Lee] Right.

- [Mark] But somehow it stuck.

- It did.

And, you know, to get to the Peoria point, what happened was...

They weren't really the inventor of the first track type tractor, but the first commercially successful track type tractor.

And there was huge growth then with the company.

You know, he really had not a lot of like competitors.

And so to make machines cheaper, all the steel at that time period was really made on the East Coast.

And to ship it all the way to California was really expensive.

So it really made a great business decision to move it closer to the East Coast.

And that's how you first get Peoria.

- So geography, it had played a big part in it.

- Geography played a big part.

In fact, they even looked at first moving it to Minneapolis.

But what they found here was there was a company in East Peoria, which was called Colean, they made steam tractors.

They couldn't make the jump to gasoline.

But what they had was a relatively new factory.

And that factory, it was sitting idle, but it had a workforce that was educated.

And not only just having an educated workforce, they had all the tools in place.

So a person named Murray Baker, right?

We have a bridge outside of this building that's named after him.

He worked with Holt to move their business here, and that's how they ended up in Peoria.

- Now in the '30s, Caterpillar begins producing diesel engines.

How big of a transition and game changer is that?

- To me, that was one of the most significant things that the company did.

Before the diesel engine, Holt first and then Caterpillar, became really kind of the company that they are today.

And so what what happened was, really after the merger in '25, both Holt and Best had the idea of racing to coming out with a diesel engine.

But what happened was neither had the funds to do it.

And what the merger really allowed that to do was to start the funding.

So really in 1927, they started research on it in what was our headquarters at that time in San Leandro, California.

And by 1931, they came out with the first tractor with the first diesel engine.

- Henry, I'm curious, you know, I'm sure you talked to your dad a lot with stories and just being around this community.

You talked to a lot of folks who had been around here a long time.

Do you know if they thought when Cat first started it would be the juggernaut it is now?

Or was it just another business here in Central Peoria?

- I remember how much pride there was and still is today.

You know, I harken back to the late '70s when we had the big snowstorms.

And the snow was up to four or five feet on your garage door.

I remember my dad... As a little boy, I remember my dad just trying to shovel out frantically to try to get to work.

And I remember as a kid thinking, "That Caterpillar place must be really special."

And then all these years later, I find it's that kind of pride.

And that pride in the Cat badge that's carried this community and Caterpillar forward for all these years.

And I think that's something that really has helped...

If you have 112,000 employees like we do all over the globe, rowing the same boat, the same way, to solve customer challenges, and allow customer to have solutions to build a better world, that makes a great company.

And it's the pride in the people that make the difference.

- Speaking of pride, we've got the Caterpillar Visitors Center, Downtown Peoria, and what does that mean for you and the rest of the folks that work at Cat, having what's essentially a monument to a company that started right here, for the most part, in central Illinois?

- So we opened the Caterpillar Visitors Center to be a global showcase of the world in 2012.

Since then, we've had over 500,000 folks come through it.

We have, this year, a whole host of opportunities to celebrate the centennial right at the Caterpillar Visitors Center.

I would encourage everybody to come down.

If they wanna look at a full list of offerings throughout the year, visitcaterpillar.com is where you go to see what our Caterpillar offerings are.

But three things jump out right off the bat at the Caterpillar Visitors Center this year.

We have three brand new centennial machines painted in Centennial Gray, which is an original color for Caterpillar before we went to Cat Yellow.

A D8, a Motor Grader, and a Wheel Loader that are massive on our product floor, in Battleship Gray with the black blades on it.

It's amazing.

And that's enough just for folks to come down and see anyway.

Beyond that, we have a new technology gallery that is out that allows us to take a step through Caterpillar's latest technology, which is immersive.

And it also allows us to change our gallery as technology changes.

There's something there for children, there's something there for adults.

Lee and his team put together some magic on refreshing our Caterpillar Heritage Gallery at the Caterpillar Visitors Center.

We also are gonna have this whole year an antique gallery walk outside the Visitors Center, where we have eight machines that kind of tell the history of Caterpillar through time.

Our power, our innovation.

It really is a company about innovation in people.

And the Caterpillar Visitors Center is a showcase for that every year.

We'll have 60,000 folks that come through the Visitors Center this year.

8,000 customers, dealers, suppliers that will visit the Visitors Center this year.

So it's a great place, it's a great Showcase for Cat, and we hope everybody joins us this year.

- Lee, going back in time, you mentioned the original gray tractors.

Let's talk a little bit about how the Cat, not only logo, but the color of the equipment changed.

- Sure.

- Gray, you know, it's a nice neutral color, but talk about that transition from gray to yellow.

- Well really, the change of the color is really kind of the transition of the company.

You have to remember, both Holt and Best were really not making earth moving products, but they were making agricultural products.

But really by the advent into the '20s, and the diesel tractor, we really switched to kind of the earth mover that you know today.

So if you had a gray tractor, right, that's sitting in the farm field, you're not gonna have safety issues that you're gonna have with a piece of equipment that's sitting on a roadside.

You remember, the '20s was the proliferation of the automobile.

So Caterpillar always thinking ahead, right?

Really worked on getting the color, or the right color, they thought, which they called at that time Highway Yellow, which evolved into what Henry said today, which is, you know, Caterpillar Yellow.

Now, the branding itself, when the companies merged both Holt and Best... You gotta remember, Holt was six times the size of Best, but Best really had the superior product line at that time.

So Best had tractors that they felt their tractors had to be flashy to compete with Holt, who had a gray machine.

So they had a black machine with red tracks.

But really by the time of the merger, because of that knowledge of what the Caterpillar tractor was, they decided to keep the color gray.

And the funny story with the color Gray is, our founder, C.L.

Best, you know, who was with the other company, you remember, it's a California company.

He got a deal with the Presidio to get Battleship Gray paint.

And so that's really how they got their paint, and that's what their source was.

But we switched it in 1931, and it's been yellow since.

- We talk about Caterpillar Yellow, but the original yellow almost seemed like a highlighter.

It was like- - Yeah.

- Really bright.

- It's much more yellower.

I think, in my opinion, the color today, it's almost like more of a orangey kind of yellow to it.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

Is that one of those things, you know, the Cat logo is iconic, and of course the colors, is that one of those things that, yeah, you may tweak the logo every few years, but essentially you're not gonna mess with it.

- You know, I've worked in other business archives where like the logos changed a lot over the years, where it has been very consistent other than in 1967, we came out with one, you know, people affectionately call it like the Pac-Man logo or the C-Block logo, which was around till the '80s to the current logo that we have today.

- I wanna talk too about, you know, obviously Cat is a big domestic company, but internationally is huge now too.

Can you tell us some of the big projects both domestically and internationally that Cat equipment has been a part of?

- Sure.

Well, you know, the first project that we really cite was a project by both Holt and Best.

So the Great Earthquake of 1906, which happened in San Francisco, leveled the city.

They lent out steam tractors to help, you know, reconstruct the city.

But really, I would say the first and most monumental project was the building of the L.A. Aqueduct, which was done with Holt, the new Caterpillar...

In fact, some of the first Caterpillar machines were sold for the L.A. Aqueduct.

And the L.A. Aqueduct at its time, it got pressed kind of like the Panama Canal did, and it really got the name Caterpillar out there, and put the brand out there.

Other notable projects were anything where, like one I think is really fun that people don't, the original Hollywood sign, that Caterpillar machines, you know, helped bring the stuff to build the letters that built that.

And the reason was, you know, it was promoting a neighborhood called :"Hollywoodland", and they just took 'em off the job sites, and they brought 'em up the hill.

We have great photos from that experience.

But, you know, anything from building like dams in China to building like the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, the Bay Bridge.

The oil sands in Canada.

I mean, people don't understand that really, Holt and Best had machines on every continent but Antarctica.

And then in the 1950s, caterpillar had the first machines on the Antarctica, and we've been global ever since.

- [Mark] I saw some pictures yesterday of the Antarctica thing, and it's amazing, that desolate, isolated area has some products from our area.

- Yeah.

And you know, it's a great Peoria story.

They were developed here.

It was like, again, the Cat innovation story.

We developed a project which we call low ground pressure tracks, where these machines wouldn't fall through the ice.

They were developed right here in Peoria, manufactured here.

They shipped 'em right to, you know, how they made it to the site, which was by ships.

So, it's one of the heaviest documented things within our collection because of it.

A lot of community pride.

- Mhm.

Henry, when people think of Cat, you know, a machine may pop into their head.

A certain machine.

But the Cat as a company does a lot of different things, a lot of different businesses.

What kind of things can you tell us about that, you know, people might be surprised to hear in terms of what they do, you know, more than just making equipment.

- You know, one of the things that people may be surprised about is our Peoria area footprint, number one.

We have 12,000 employees working here in the Peoria area.

And if I could paint the picture for you just a second in terms where those folks are at.

We have thousands of engineers up in Mossville designing and developing the next phase of products and services for Caterpillar.

And if you look at Morton, we have a world-class logistics facility that moves parts in and out of there to the customers all over the world.

Our largest distribution center in the world is right here in Morton, Illinois.

Downtown, in our office space, in downtown, we have thousands of folks who report to work every day.

HR, legal, brand marketing and whatnot.

And one of the most interesting pieces of my job is going over to East Peoria to see our iconic factor where we build the D9 and the D10, the D11 track type dozers.

A lot of things we built in East Peoria, it's the only place in the world where you can get those.

If you see a D10 or a D11 working out in a large mine site, that came from East Peoria.

And there's a lot of pride there for our employees too, and to see that iconic facility.

If you go out to Edwards, our Edwards Demonstration Center, you have a fantastic customer and dealer learning center.

The proving ground, right on the cusp there between Washington and East Peoria, off Category Trail, is involved with a lot of prototypes and validation of machines.

Everywhere you go in this community, folks are touched by Caterpillar.

Caterpillar product, Caterpillar employees.

Now I haven't even got to the suppliers yet, 'cause we have a lot of local suppliers too, who depend on us every day and we depend on them.

So I think about unique stories and unique aspects of Caterpillar, I start with our amazing products.

And then I'd also like to at least comment a little bit on our Caterpillar Foundation.

Because we're also giving back and helping improve communities throughout the world where our employees live and work.

Our Caterpillar Foundation started interestingly in 1952, with one donation to an East Peoria Firehouse.

And since then our foundation has helped communities all over the world, to the extent of $975 million.

We're approaching $1 billion of giving back throughout the world.

And that's a neat story, but it all started right here in East Peoria with one donation to the East Peoria Firehouse.

And finally, I looked at this the other day, the last 10 years for Central Illinois, the foundation has given back $59 million to this area.

So that's a big help for this area, and it shows some of the positive influence that Caterpillar has on this region.

- Yeah, it's hard to go to a big local event or a charity event and not see the Caterpillar logo in the program.

I know a lot of people are happy that the company continues to give back.

There was some concern a few years ago, you know, when the corporate headquarters moved up north to the Chicago suburbs and then onto Texas.

It seemed like it was more of a psychological thing with people.

They kind of panicked a little bit.

But judging by the amount of money that the foundation continues to give, and the thousands of people that are still employed here, it doesn't seem like it was that big of a hiccup.

- It's comforting to know that since 2017, we still have about 12,000 employees here.

And we still have all the vibrancy and the stuff that I just mentioned.

And, you know, we're excited about the first hundred years of our Caterpillar walk, and we're doubly excited about the next chapter.

Caterpillar will continue to, you know, review its footprint every year from a corporate perspective, whether it's manufacturing or whether it's office space.

But the fact that we have 12,000 folks here, and the energy here, and the impact we have on Caterpillar's global community is comforting, and we're excited about that.

- I wanna get back to the archives a little bit.

One of the cool things I saw, we were talking about Antarctica, where you can proudly put a Cat flag now.

In 1969, Cat engines powered the Apollo 11 mission.

- [Lee] Yes.

- That's pretty impressive.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, because you had these sites which were very remote.

They could be in the Pacific Ocean, right?

They had no way of powering other than if you had, you know, like a Cat gen set.

And actually our stuff even goes back even pre-Apollo.

It was being used for the same type of purposes for the Mercury missions that were done kind of setting the table for Apollo.

- I wanna ask both of you this.

With all the archives that you have, all the images, all the physical things, do each of you have a favorite- - Yes.

- [Mark] Pierce of... What is it?

- Yes, yes.

Well, mine is, and it's a great Peoria story.

So there was a Caterpillar basketball team, which was called the Caterpillar Diesels.

They were later renamed the Peoria Cats.

But in 1952, they won the gold medal.

And you ask, "How did they win the Olympic gold medal?"

Well, a lot different than today.

And this kind of works perfect with like, you know, like thinking about things like the Final Four.

The team that won the NCAA tournament, which was the University of Kansas at that time, played the winner of what they called the Industrial League.

And the Industrial League was made up of companies such as Caterpillar, Phillips 66, a lot of big companies.

And the players, right, 'cause they had a job, working for the company.

They were amateurs.

Though they did go and play out of a lot of big schools.

The Caterpillar Diesels won that tournament that year, beat Kansas, so their five players were the starters in the Olympics.

And their coach was the coach.

The backups were the Kansas team, and the assistant coach was Kansas coach.

So they defeated the Soviet Union, and we have the signed basketball by all of the players and the coaches from the gold medal game.

Now we don't have a gold medal, but I would argue there was only one basketball, and there were 10 gold medals.

So, I think that's pretty neat.

- Very interesting piece of history.

Do you have a specific piece you like?

- Lee has an amazing collection, and there's a C.L.

Best 50 year pin.

But you know, for me, it's personal because we had a Panama Canal exhibit a few years ago, and Lee did a great job putting that together.

And during the dependency of that, we had media over, and we had a lot of vibrancy around, and a lot of people.

But this one fellow showed up, his family had worked on the Panama Canal project, and he gave us right there during the media event, his family stuff.

The work bottles, the hard hats and those kind of things.

And he gave it over with such pride.

And we still have those today.

And for me, those are the most important ones.

The ones that tell a story that are personal, that I can see and touch.

And the Panama Canal items that that fellow gave us is meaningful to me.

In fact, we still have 'em over at the Cat Visitors Center.

- Yeah, well, you know, Mark, everyone asks me like, why do we do this?

Why does Caterpillar make this investment in an archives?

And the reason is... (Lee clears throat) Excuse me.

The reason is, right?

These assets that we'll call 'em, these artifacts, these images, these documents, they tell great stories, and great stories inspire people.

And that's really the story of Caterpillar, right?

It's inspiration, it's innovation, you know, it's the things that we've done to change the world.

- I'm sure people out there watching this, you know, if you live in the Central Illinois, you know someone who works for Cat, or maybe a family member.

Are there any items out there that you're looking for that people may have up in the attic or in the basement?

- Well, the one thing I'll tell people, when I first started, which I've been at Cat almost 13 years, it was when the Visitors Center opened.

I had been at the company maybe a month.

And it was open not just to the public, but to employees.

And so tons of people were coming through, and, you know, I didn't really know that much then.

But a person came through and he said, "I live in the Peoria area, and when they designed the D9 tractor in the '50s, they built like a replica of it out of wood, like a car company, wood to design a car."

And he said, "That's sitting in my barn."

And I was like, "Really?"

So I gave him a business card and stuff...

I never heard from him back.

So if he watches today, we're still interested.

(Henry laughs) - Very interesting.

We're running outta time, I wish we had another hour to talk, but let's talk about the future.

You know, Cat has, with the times, looking at your timeline for the last hundred years, has been innovative and you know, we've seen equipment now that's running on batteries instead of diesel.

What do you see for the future of the company?

Where's it going?

And what does Cat need to do to stay on top?

- I think we have the world's best engineers to continue to make products that serve our customers' needs.

There's no way to know like 15 years ago that some of our best customers were gonna be big data centers, for example.

So we're constantly innovating, constantly finding new ways to serve our customers' needs.

And the customers drive that a lot.

And you talk about fuel cells and fuel opportunities, we don't look at fuel as maybe, you know, we need to use this fuel versus another one.

We look at what's the customer's needs, and how do we apply that application and serve those customers.

Some may need batteries to work in confined spaces, some may need a different type of fuel, you know, who maybe doesn't have a confined space, but it's in an open area.

So the innovation comes from great people making great solutions for our customers, and and understanding what the customers' demands are.

- And, you know, we learn by viewing history, and you've got a lot of history in the archive center.

What do you think this company's going?

- I think the future for us is whatever we make it, right?

And what kind of excites me, as a history person is, like, for example, we have things where they were drawing futuristic products of, you know, what would be the eventual design or hopefully the eventual design of our products working across not just the globe, right?

But across the universe.

And I think our future is limitless.

- Well, unfortunately, we are out of time.

How can people find out more about Cat 100, and partake in some of the festivities that you have- - So we would really encourage everyone to go out to visitcatepillar.com, and we always have updated events and opportunities for folks to celebrate with us all year.

- All right, sounds good.

Gentlemen, very interesting stuff.

I hope you come back again, and we can talk about Cat in the next five or 10 years.

Lee Fosburgh is the lucky manager of the Caterpillar Corporate Archives.

Sounds like an awesome job.

Henry Vicary, Director of Community Relations and Guest Services.

Thanks for coming on, gentlemen.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Appreciate it.

- Appreciate it.

And thank you for watching.

We appreciate you.

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Have a good night.

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