Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 4

THE MODERN BULLDOZER
A FOREST SERVICE PROJECT
By Howard R. Jones

A U.S. Civil Service examination taken in June of 1929, led to an offer for "the position of Junior Civil Engineer in the Forest Service at a salary of $2,000 per annum, effective January 16, 1930" at San Francisco. We moved to California.

Early that spring Chester Jordan, who was in charge of roadwork for the Forest Service California region, came into the engineering office and spoke to the man I worked for. He said, "Earl is having trouble making those drawings of the bulldozer and that he would like to borrow someone who could make them". So, I met Mr. Jordan and also met Earl Hall, a Forest Service road construction foreman.

Now, to go back a few years to the late 1920's, when the Forest Service was beginning to push fire protection roads into back country where hillsides were too steep for convenient work by the methods of that time. Mr. Jordan made a visit to Montana and Idaho, where Fred Thieme then was the Forest Service Regional Engineer with office at Missoula, Montana. The two men looked at road jobs and talked over their problems. Mr. Thieme writes to me about this:

"The first step in our road building of that time was to build a sort of trail by means of a horse-drawn, two way, reversible, breaking plow. After a couple of furrows which made a better footing for the horse, a one-horse-drawn Martin ditcher was used to widen the tread until wide enough for a team to pull a small grader."

Thieme mentioned to Jordan an idea he had been thinking about for some time, that a plow mounted in front of a crawler tractor might work a lot better than the horse drawn rig. They decided to attempt to develop that suggestion and arranged with each of their offices to share in the cost, with the work to be done in California where the Forest Service had an adequate shop. Jordan told Earl Hall to go ahead and he did, not with a plow, but with a blade in front of and extending across the full width of a crawler tractor. The blade was set at an angle like the blade of a road grader.

Earl first built a little wooden model of a tractor and blade, about two feet long and a foot high. He called it a trail builder. Then, at the shop near Oakland, he built a full size model and mounted it on a crawler tractor. This was the birth of the "bulldozer".

I don't know about the test runs of this machine, but it was considered to be a success and by early spring of 1930 the decision was made to have several built. Thus the need for the design drawings that I made for Mr. Jordan.

To make these drawings was like old times to me; a happy chance to get out of the office and spend some time with Earl Hall in the shop. Measurements and sketches were made and then back to the office for the drafting. From these drawings a firm in Davis, California, built a number of bulldozers, under contract with the Forest Service.

Forest Service files contain a memorandum by Hall dated August 12, 1930, describing his demonstrations of the new bulldozers in the Montana-Idaho area. This was the first use of this type of equipment in the Northwest. Hall ends his memo by saying, "They surely need roads up here." I'm sure that while testing his first dozer and during demonstrations of the manufactured ones, that Hall was careful to keep within the machine's limitations. Obviously he wasn't about to bust up this child of his. However, under other operators, failure of parts was all too common and so Fred Thieme had a sturdier unit made by the Isaacson Iron Works of Seattle.

The thing that made Hall's machine revolutionary was the hydraulic cylinder and pump powered by a takeoff from the tractor engine. This was a power control device with which the operator could raise and lower the dozer blade without leaving his seat on the tractor and if he wanted, while the tractor was moving. Also the blade being set at an angle for side casting of excavated material is an important item of the design for construction of roads along hillsides.

The dozer was an instant success. It quickly became known to representatives of tractor manufacturing firms and to others that were in or wanted to get into the road machinery business. The Forest Service did not apply for patent nor make any effort to control the manufacture or sale of this machine. Isaacson Iron Works, LeTourneau, Bucyrus-Erie, Gar Wood Industries and others were soon making similar machines, somewhat different in design and heavier, but of the same general principle. The LeTourneau dozer had a power operated drum and cable to control the height of the blade. This was quite different from the hydraulic control and it worked well.

The bulldozer tremendously increased the uses of the crawler tractor. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of forest roads have been built with the bulldozer as the primary, often the only, earth moving machine.

A question comes up sometimes about who should have the credit. All but Fred Thieme are gone now, (Editor's note: Fred Thieme died this past year) so perhaps it is not too important at this late date. Such things start long, long ago, with the man who thought of the wheel. There were blades pushed in front of teams of oxen, thus the name bulldozer. When crawler tractors came, blades were hung in front of them. They could push loose soil and were used for backfilling trenches.

Thieme and Jordan, Forest Service officers who recognized the importance and probability of improved methods and decided on action toward that end, should share the credit. They acted under the traditional Forest Service decentralized management that gave them responsibility and authority to make decisions, arrange financing and take action; which incidentally is the factor largely responsible for Forest Service being a top agency.

Earl Hall must be given the major credit. He built the first modern bulldozer. If we ever have a hall of fame to preserve the memory of those who made outstanding contribution to development of construction equipment for work like road building, Earl Hall certainly should be high on the list of men to be honored in it.

I don't know anything about Jordan's background. He was about sixty years of age when I knew him. He never talked much, in fact as I recall, hardly at all. Likely he worked mostly out of doors, not much of an office man. He was tremendously pleased with the design drawings and he had a wildly exaggerated notion about the skill it took to make them.

At that time the Forest Service did not have any orderly personnel management procedure. The voluminous files and lots of people employed in personnel offices common today, were mostly unknown then. If a man was doing well in his current job, it was usually assumed that he would do as well anywhere. While this old quick and easy practice seems to me to have worked about as well as the modern slow and careful one, it did involve too much of an element of luck for advancement.

The Chief Engineer of the Forest Service asked Jordan to recommend a man for a job in the Washington, D.C. office. I was transferred to Washington in April 1931 with a substantial raise in pay. A time when thousands of good men were out of work. I remember Jordan and Hall with affection, Hall because he couldn't make the drawings and Jordan because he was so pleased with them.

In the spring of 1933, President Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps. Most of the CCC worked on the national forests. At that time the engineering office in Washington handled the procurement of automotive items and construction machinery for all Forest Service areas. Jack Haile did this and I worked for him. We wrote specifications, reviewed bids and Jack signed the purchase orders. This was sort of a side issue to our varied engineering jobs, but as the CCC rapidly expanded, it took a lot of time. Jack left in 1934 to become head of the road machinery division of Gar Wood Industries at Detroit. After that, for a couple of years, I was the part-time procurement officer.

Jack and I bought tractor-dozer outfits by the hundreds, trucks by the thousands and a lot of other equipment. When the CCC was disbanded in 1942, most of that material that was still useful was taken by the U.S. Army. Some of it was used by the Army on construction of the pioneer road that since has been improved to become the Alaska Highway.

The bulldozer made history in World War II. General Eisenhower, in his "Crusade in Europe" gives it credit for being one of the items of equipment responsible for victory in Africa and in Europe. He also tells of mounting dozers on Sherman tanks. These machines provided safety for the operators and were not easily damaged by enemy fire. They were used to make passable the mountain roads partially destroyed by retreating enemy forces. They worked with the advancing front lines so that transport could bring up supplies and take wounded back.

The bulldozer in record short time became known the world over, so well known that to most people everywhere, the word bulldozer includes the tractor on which the attachment is mounted, and thus means the tractor-dozer combination.

(Reference: "The Bulldozer" a Forest Service, Region One publication, 1955. It includes parts of Earl Hall's memorandum of August 12, 1930, a photograph of the first hand made dozer of Hall's design, and a copy of one of the drawings from which the first commercial order of dozers were manufactured.)