Giant bulldozers: A moving story

Following last month’s Back track feature on the origins of the bulldozer, we thought we’d add a little detail on these magnificent machines.

It's weird, but the bulldozer, for all the destruction it can wreak is often seen as a sign of peace and prosperity.

Certainly across Europe, people were glad to see early hydraulic models arrive after the war as their presence showed that the continent was going to rise out of the rubble again.

Equally, in Mexican art, the bulldozer was seen as a change for the better - a representative of modernity, even - ‘We have had enough of pretty pictures of grinning peons in traditional Tehuana dress,' said artist David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1955: ‘I say, to hell with ox-carts - let's see more tractors and bulldozers'.

Of course, as a tool the dozer has been incredibly successful. Admiral William F. Halsey said "The four machines that won the war in the pacific were the submarine, radar, the airplane and the bulldozer".

Certainly by the mid 1950s bulldozers had become more than tractors with attachments. They had become integrated units, designed from the ground up. Like the race to build taller than anyone else today, back then manufacturers were locked in a battle to build the biggest bulldozer.

Machines then, as now, were easily identifiable by their colours. Cat were yellow of course, but the other big players at the time included International (bright red) Euclid (lime green) and Allis Chalmers(so-called ‘Persian' orange) There were some interesting design features at this time, Euclid's first crawler tractor in 1955 featured a split pivoting  frame with an engine and transmission on each half. When introduced, it's 40-tonne weight and 402 horsepower gave it the title of the world's largest tractor, though it wasn't intended to be a ‘dozer.

The 83 horsepower Cat diesel Seventy-Five tractor was made in the early thirties, when it was replaced in 1935 by the Caterpillar D8. This marked the beginning of the famous numbering series, which the firm still employ today, more than 70 years later.

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