Cummins is a multinational Fortune 500 company that operates and serves customers around the globe. At the same time, Cummins retains strong ties to its Indiana home, where the Company's headquarters remain.
Cummins' roots thrive from innovation, persistence and a commitment to community. Founded in Columbus, Ind., in 1919 as Cummins Engine Company by Clessie Lyle Cummins, the firm was among the first to see the commercial potential of an unproven engine technology invented two decades earlier by Rudolph Diesel.
Clessie Cummins was a self taught mechanic and inventor with the desire to develop the first diesel-powered automobile. He placed the diesel engine in a used Packard limousine and took W. G. Irwin for a spin on Christmas Day in 1929. W. G. Irwin was a successful banker and investor with enthusiasm for the new engine. This led to the enormous financial support, which helped earn Cummins foothold as an engine supplier to the trucking industry.
Cummins Creek
EVANDER CUMMINS
Albert B. Cummins (1850-1926)In 1933, the company released the Model H, a powerful engine for transportation that launched the company's most successful engine family. J. Irwin Miller, great-nephew of W.G. Irwin, became general manager in 1934 and went on to lead the company to international prominence over the next four decades. By marketing high-quality products through a unique nationwide service organization, the company earned its first profit in 1937. Three years later, Cummins offered the industry's first 100,000-mile warranty.
By the 1950s, America had begun a massive interstate highway construction program, with Cummins engines powering much of the equipment that built the roads and thousands of the trucks that began to utilize them. Combining lab-based research and field-based trials allowed Cummins to achieve technological breakthroughs, including the revolutionary PT (pressure-time) fuel injection system of 1954. By the late 1950s, Cummins had sales of over $100 million...