Turbo Diesel Registry
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1504224
8 www.turbodieselregister.com www.turbodieselregister.com TDR 121 TDR 121 A BOY NAMED CLESSIE by Bill Millard In later days Cummins Engine Company prospered and could afford a staff of engineers. It's said one Friday afternoon the Company's founder (and original engineer) happened into a rather sizable meeting of those folks and asked what they were doing. They told him that a newly upgraded engine had a low oil pressure problem and they'd formed a committee to work out how to fix it. They'd appreciate his input, but the technical complexities would probably be too deep for him. Well, he told them, it was getting late; why not just knock off for the weekend and sleep on it. Maybe it would be better on Monday. So most everyone left, and the founder asked his brother to quickly run up to their supplier and have them cut some new oil pump gears a half-inch wider. Somebody else had the local foundry cast a new housing to fit. Parts in hand, they did the required machining and slapped the bigger pump on the engine. By Monday morning there was oil pressure to spare. The founder didn't much hold with committees: direct action was more his style. Clessie was named after his grandmother. That's guaranteed trouble Clessie was named after his grandmother. That's guaranteed trouble – must have triggered many schoolyard fights – but it didn't seem to do much harm in the long run, considering all he accomplished. He was to become an intuitive engineer and machinist, adventurous, intense, a master of the practical solution. That would be his life, and it would eventually ruin his health, but only after he'd made "Cummins" the road Diesel's most prominent first name. Clessie Lyle Cummins was born on a farm near Indianapolis in 1888, in a generation that believed anything was possible if you just wanted to think and work hard enough. It was a generation that included Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, and Charlie Nash; a generation who tended to achieve their own advanced degrees without benefit of formal education, a generation of people who were admired and respected for such accomplishments. He grew up in Indiana – all over Indiana. The family was continually on-the-move, as his father was a partner in a barrel hoop factory, which relocated whenever the good elm was logged-out. So, Clessie's schools were many and varied, as were his friends. Clessie was a personable guy, easy to meet, great sense of humor; those things would serve him well. The family lived in the small town of Columbus, Indiana, when Clessie parted ways with school after the eighth grade. He had no patience with the classroom, but his real education had started early. He'd figured out quite young how to design and build steam engines and other mechanical marvels, some of which triggered calamities on his mother's cookstove. By the time he was a teen he was well on the way to being a self-taught engineer. After dropping out of school he had short careers as a machinist tester and inspector at a number of companies around Indiana – Reeves Pulley, Marmon, Teetor-Hartley Motors (became Perfect Circle Piston Rings). But what he really wanted at his still-young age was to be able to live in Columbus near the family. That chance finally came (with a substantial pay cut) in the form of chauffeur duties with Columbus' Irwin banking family. Thus started his life- long, mostly happy relationship, with William Glanton (W.G.) Irwin. He would be his friend for decades, his "second father," alternately his angel and his bane. So came financial backing for his engine enterprises, but with many strings attached. Clessie was never "only a chauffeur," never even a full-time one, for that matter. Along the way he returned to Marmon several times, as well as repair automobiles and did job work in his own Columbus machine shop. And his experiments with engines never ceased. He settled on Diesel engines, but it could have been most anything and he'd have been successful, given a little backing. Such was Clessie's intelligence, persistence – and daring. In 1912 he built a 16-foot boat, powered by a small gasoline engine. No big deal, except that after it was finished, he recruited his brother-in-law (he'd married in 1910) to help him navigate it down the Mississippi to New Orleans. It was just a little boat ride that nearly got them killed a few times, but it taught him some of life's important lessons; one of which was that in places where gasoline was hard to find, an engine that would run on lesser fuels would have been great to have. (How things change! Now, with millions of diesels on the road, how often do diesel drivers have to prowl between the gas pumps to find their fuel?) By 1916, contract machine work had crowded out auto repairs as the Cummins Machine Works and Clessie had picked up a license to produce a Dutch Diesel design called the Hvid/Brons. Soon the Cummins Engine Company was making six-horsepower Hvid engines, which attracted the attention of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Clessie landed a Sears contract for more engines than he could possibly make, in largely-untried smaller sizes. Even with W.G.'s backing, Cummins couldn't keep up with Sears' demand, and the engines never worked too well anyway – Sears got lots of them back. (Editor's note; Folklore has it that Sears' money-back policy was the cause for many a return unit. The farmer would use the diesel pump engine for the season and post-season return it for a refund.)