This book examines the Texas-based company's heavy equipment that has been used in the mining, construction, and oil industries from the 1920s to present. Two hundred photos illustrate the fascinating tales behind LeTourneau breakthroughs like the first electric-diesel front-end loader. Founder Robert Gilmour LeTourneau is regarded as the father of high-volume earthmoving equipment, and holds more U.S. patents than any other person, save Thomas Edison. Fans of heavy equipment are sure to enjoy this profile of the manufacturer of the world's largest front-end loaders.

Over the years LeTourneau has produced some of the world’s largest and most productive rubber-tired wheel loaders, wheel dozers, and haulers, including the world record breaking L-2350 Wheel Loader, the largest of its kind ever produced and offered to the mining industry. So large is the L-2350, it requires the world’s largest tires ever made to carry the massive digging machine. Utilizing state-of-the-art diesel-electric drive systems, LeTourneau machines are at the forefront of today’s most advanced technology being utilized in ultra-large mining rubber-tired loaders and dozers. Focusing on machines designed and built during the time period of 1968 to present, all of the company’s quarry and mining machine offerings, including past LeTro-Loader, LeTro-Dozer, and Titan haul truck designs, as well as current equipment product lines, are featured in great detail Behind the scenes images, as well as model and working views, bring these giants to life with rare historic and modern photography, most of which has never been seen in publication before, making this a must have for all heavy equipment enthusiasts.

CATERPILLAR CHRONICLE tells the whole Caterpillar story--from 1870 to the present. More than 200 color and 50 black-and-white phtographs reveal these heavy-metal monsters in their true grandeur, from prototype testing to on the job service.

The coming of the railways signalled the transformation of European society, allowing the quick and cheap mass transportation of people and goods on a previously unimaginable scale. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the domination of rail transport was threatened by increased motorised road transport which would quickly surpass and eclipse the trains, only itself to be challenged in the twenty-first century by a renewal of interest in railways. Yet, as the studies in this volume make clear, to view the relationship between road and rail as a simple competition between two rival forms of transportation, is a mistake. Rail transport did not vanish in the twentieth century any more than road transport vanished in the nineteenth with the appearance of the railways. Instead a mutual interdependence has always existed, balancing the strengths and weaknesses of each system. It is that interdependence that forms the major theme of this collection. Divided into two main sections, the first part of the book offers a series of chapters examining how railway companies reacted to increasing competition from road transport, and exploring the degree to which railways depended on road transportation at different times and places. Part two focuses on road mobility, interpreting it as the innovative success story of the twentieth century. Taken together, these essays provide a fascinating reappraisal of the complex and shifting nature of European transportation over the last one hundred years.

Rowan Companies grew from the dreams of two Texas brothers, Charles and Archibald Rowan, and their $16,000 oil rig. The two men started out as roughnecks, and founded the company in 1923. The men formed a lifelong partnership based on hard work, loyalty to their workers and cost-conscious business sense. Rowan Companies today builds and operates huge offshore drilling rigs and owns a fleet of helicopters and airplanes that provide services as varied as medical flights and Alaskan sightseeing tours. Relive the struggles and stories in the pages of The Legend of Rowan. Individually boxed.

In Yellow Steel, the first overarching history of the earthmoving equipment industry, William Haycraft examines the tremendous increase in the scope of mining and construction projects, from the Suez Canal through the interstate highway system, made possible by innovations in earthmoving machinery. Led by Cyrus McCormick's invention in 1831 of a practical mechanical reaper, many of the builders of today's massive earthmoving machines began as makers of reapers, plows, threshers, and combines. Haycraft traces the efforts of manufacturers such as Caterpillar, Allis-Chalmers, International Harvester, J. I. Case, Deere, and Massey-Ferguson to diversify from farm equipment to specialized earthmoving equipment and the important contributions of LeTourneau, Euclid, and others in meeting the needs of the construction and mining industries. He shows how postwar economic and political events, especially the creation of the interstate highway system, spurred the development of more powerful and more agile machines. He also relates the precipitous fall of several major American earthmoving machine companies and the rise of Japanese competitors in the early 1980s. Extensively illustrated and packed with detailed information on both manufacturers and machines, Yellow Steel knits together the diverse stories of the many companies that created the earthmoving equipment industry--how they began, expanded, retooled, merged, succeeded, and sometimes failed. Their history, a step-by-step linking of need and invention, provides the foundation for virtually all modern transportation, construction, commerce, and industry.

In the history of heavy equipment development, no single man’s name is more respected or revered as that of R. G. LeTourneau. Robert Gilmour LeTourneau is considered by many to be the dean of high-speed mobile earthmoving equipment. His designs of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s laid the fundamental groundwork for many of the earthmoving machines we see on a daily basis. Self-propelled, rubber tired scrapers, bulldozing blades, and rippers were all conceived under his engineering genius in the quest for moving material at the lowest-cost-per-yard. The time period of 1921 to 1953 saw many of R. G. LeTourneau’s most important heavy-equipment introductions, such as the Carryall and the Tournapull, and the initial development of the electric drive wheel. This first volume of fantastic machine creations covers the early years up until the sale of the company to Westinghouse in 1953. Standard production, specials, and experimental machines in rare archival images, some in print for the very first time, help showcase what made R. G. LeTourneau so important in the heavy equipment industry.

The long-lost conclusion to The Once and Future King, in which King Arthur faces his final battle against his son. This magical account of King Arthur’s last night on earth, rediscovered in a collection of T. H. White’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list following its publication in 1977. While preparing for his final, fatal battle with his bastard son, Mordred, Arthur returns to the Animal Council with Merlyn, where the deliberations center on ways to abolish war. More self-revealing than any other of White’s books, Merlyn shows his mind at work as he agonized over whether to join the fight against Nazi Germany while penning the epic that would become The Once and Future King. The Book of Merlyn has been cited as a major influence by such illustrious writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, J. K. Rowling, Helen Macdonald, Neil Gaiman, and Lev Grossman. “Arriving from beyond the curve of time and apparently from the grave, The Book of Merlyn stirs its own pages, saying, wait: you didn’t get the whole story. . . . It gives us a final glimpse of those two immortal characters, Wart and Merlyn, up close, slo-mo, with a considered and affectionate scrutiny. The book is an elegiac posting from a master storyteller of the twentieth century. Its reissue in our next century is just as welcome as when it first arrived forty years ago. . . . Certainly the moral questions about the military use of force perplex the world still. . . . The efficacy of treaties, the trading of insults among the potentates of the day, the testing of weapons, the weaponizing of trade—these strategies are still front and center. Rather terrifyingly so. We do well to revisit what that old schoolteacher of children, Merlyn, has been trying to point out to us about power and responsibility.” —Gregory Maguire, bestselling author of Wicked,from the foreword “Such a small thing, The Book of Merlyn, to hold so much. Joyful and despairing, heartbreaking, yet full of hope. As wonderful and fearful to read today as it was when I first found it in 1978. And the world has as much need of it today as it did then—more, perhaps. But will the world be ready to listen?” —Mercedes Lackey, New York Times–bestselling author of the Valdemar and Elves on the Road series