March of the Monsters

(See Cover)

Each day at dawn an explosion of sound reverberates through the hills above California's Carquinez Strait, 30 miles up San Pablo Bay from San Francisco and the Golden Gate. At the sandy tip of a new superhighway pushing across the hills from Richmond to the industrial town of Crockett, an army of mammoth machines comes noisily to life; their motors growl and their exhausts spout blue fumes into the mountain air. Tough, broadnosed bulldozers hungrily tear up the soil; potbellied scrapers scoop and level it; lumbering compact-ers press it down with their massive weight. Directly before the machines looms a 500-ft. hill that stood in the way of the inland-bound gold seekers of the 1840s, forced the Southern Pacific railroad and later a highway to slink humbly around its base. But it does not deter the road builders of 1957. Their rugged and powerful machines are slashing through the hill, cutting a 360-ft.-deep, 2,200-ft.-long scar --the biggest man-made road gash since the Panama Canal. All told, the machines will move 8,500,000 cu. yd. of earth, enough to cover Manhattan Island with a 4.5-in. layer.

The road builders' monster machines were busy everywhere last week. They pushed across the green pastures of Illinois, through the swamps of Florida, over the hills of Arkansas, along the rocky New England coast. Unlike the nation's earlier road builders, who often followed Indian trails, cow paths and other roundabout routes of least resistance, today's planners lay out their roads from helicopters and planes with an eye to the shortest distance, then put their machines to cutting the highways over mountains and through trackless timberland, bridging lakes and rivers, spanning cities.

The American Art. The panorama of road builders stringing highways across the land reflects a peculiarly American genius, one that lies deep in the traditional pioneering instincts of the nation. No other country has come close to the U.S. in creating the mechanized giants of road building. "Road building," said one contractor, "is really the American art." Said the late Bernard DeVoto: "A highway is a true index of our culture. The machinery that builds it embodies developments in technology, invention, industrial progress, education, finance and so many other things that our whole cultural heritage has gone into producing it."

For the mechanical behemoths, such jobs as the Carquinez cut are only a warmup for the greatest road-building challenge in U.S. history: a vast, 16-year highway-building program that will crisscross the nation with a 41,000-mile interstate superhighway network,* plus thousands of miles of state and local roads. The program will be the largest public-works project in history, dwarfing the construction of the Roman road system and the Great Wall of China. The interstate network will reach into every corner of the U.S.--75% of it over new routes--to link 42 state capitals and 90% of all cities with more than 50,000 population. It will carry a fifth of the nation's traffic, provide vital defense routes in case of war. Total cost of the entire program: $100 billion--nearly 300 times the cost of the Panama Canal. The Government will pay 90% of the federal network, 50% of other roads, by raising gasoline, tire and other excise taxes.

The new superhighways will have a profound effect on the lives of the most mobile people on earth. One out of every seven Americans earns his living in some phase of highway travel; 80% drive to work; 85% take their vacations and pleasure trips by auto. Yet U.S. highways, sadly neglected during World War II, have fallen far behind the growing numbers of automobiles, trucks and buses, now up to 65 million. The new roads will ease present congestion, be able to accommodate the nearly 90 million vehicles that are expected to speed over U.S. roads by 1972. With fewer curves, no crossroads and a wide center strip, the super system is expected to save 3,500 lives annually, reduce accident costs by $725 million, save commercial operators another $825 million by cutting delay, fuel waste, tire and brake wear. It will be designed for safe speeds of up to 70 m.p.h. (today's average highway speeds: passenger cars 51, trucks 46, buses 52). Motorists will be able to drive from Los Angeles to New York over the federal network without passing a single traffic light or intersection.

Over the Swimming Pools. In the nation's economic and social life, the federal program will work far-reaching changes. Burgeoning highways will start new businesses all along their routes; $150 million in new plants has gone up along Massachusetts' six-year-old Route 128, and the recently completed New York State Thruway has already attracted dozens of industries. New towns will grow up around the geometric cloverleafs, and commuters will be able to drive long distances to work at a mile a minute. Highway motels, now growing at the rate of 3,000 a year, will multiply even faster to serve additional millions of Americans who will take to the open road.

While the advance of the ribbons of pavement will benefit the lives of many Americans, it will harshly disrupt the lives of many others. More than 2,000,000 acres of land will have to be bought to make way for the federal highway network alone. Roads will slice through densely populated cities and suburbs, displacing thousands of dwellers. They will cut across thousands of farms from coast to coast, often separating a farmer's house from his fields and forcing him to detour for miles to get from one side of his land to the other. Last week at Encino, Calif., a superhighway bulldozed its way past the front door of Hollywood Actor Edward Everett Horton, burying his tennis court, swimming pool and formal garden. Dozens of California swimming pools, their bottoms knocked out to prevent water from collecting, have been buried far beneath the new roads, a possible puzzle for future archaeologists. A classic case of inconvenience occurred when a new road cut off a farmer's privy from his house, forcing him either to build a new one or make an eightmile. trip and pay a toll. (He built a new one.) In Atlanta, an apartment building is being moved from the path of a new road while tenants continue to live in it with the services of all utilities.

$7.3 Billion Order. But the superhighways' first big impact will be felt by the men who make the two dozen different basic types of road-building machines. Each $1 billion increase in the amount spent for road building will require $500 million in new equipment to do the job--some 70,000 major new machines worth $900 million in the first five years of the program alone. Counting spare parts and replacements (present machines will have to be replaced twice during the life of the program), the nation's 350 major equipment manufacturers will have to turn out more than $7.3 billion worth of equipment just for the federal portion of the program. Before the program ends, the army of 143,700 earthmoving machines now in use will grow to more than one million.

To meet these demands, the road-building-machine industry has already sunk $200 million into new plants, this year plans to boost plant outlay by another 26%. Present industry sales of about $2 billion annually are expected to double in the next ten years, and manufacturers will have to increase their production by 45% within three years to keep pace with the federal program.

The new web of superhighways is possible only because of the power, speed and versatility of today's road-building machines. They can bite off 5 1/2 cu. yd. of earth at a time, lay down pavement at 102 ft. a minute, propel their huge frames at speeds up to 37 m.p.h., pick up a small house to get it out of the way. Paving a four-lane, 236-mile highway in one season, for example, would have been impossible in prewar years, yet contractors did it with ease on the Kansas Turnpike last year. Ten years ago it took 250 working days to move 2,500,000 yards of dirt; today it can be moved in less than half the time--and more cheaply. Such is the efficiency of the machines that the cost of earthmoving--one-third of the federal program's total cost--is about the same as it was in the 1920s.

From the Farm. Like many another American machine development, today's road builders got their start down on the farm. Shortly after the turn of the century, a young man named Benjamin Holt began producing the first crawler (endless chain) tractors as a prime mover for farm equipment. In the road-building boom that followed growth of the auto industry, the crawler tractor moved off the farm and onto the highway.

By 1917 crawlers were being turned out by more than 200 firms--five times as many as today. But horses and mules continued to provide most of the motive power for road building, pulling primitive Fresno scrapers and pushing wooden "Mormon Boards," largely because the tractor was expensive and unreliable. Many tractors broke down and were left to rust in open fields or by the roadside. Rival muleskinners added to the tractor's troubles by loosening its bolts at night, pouring sugar into the gas tanks and sand into the gearboxes. Then Holt and other companies thought of attaching a metal blade to the tractor's nose, and the versatile bulldozer was born (a salesman is supposed to have said: "That'll bulldoze 'em"). Soon it bulldozed the horses and mules out of business, and manufacturers turned their energies to feverish competition with each other.

Bibles & Whisky. Their freewheeling techniques were made famous by the fictional Alexander Botts, whose adventures as sales manager of the Earthworm Tractor Co. have delighted readers of the Saturday Evening Post since 1927. Earthworm is patterned after the Caterpillar Tractor Co., which was formed by a merger of Holt and another manufacturer named C. L. Best. Botts's creator: onetime Caterpillar Mechanic William Hazlett Upson.

Though Botts is fictional, his adventures are easily matched by real salesmen in the fiercely competitive equipment industry. Rival bulldozer salesmen are often forced by a prospective buyer to match their machines against each other; whichever can move the most earth in a day gets the sale. Once a classic, week-long competition was held in Texas between Holt and Allis-Chalmers to determine who would get a fat contract. With a less powerful tractor than their rival, Holt's men devised a Botts-like scheme to win the day. They worked like demons from dawn to dark--except when their rivals came across town to check on their progress. Then Holt's operators slowed to a crawl, casually stopped their machines, chatted blithely with spectators. The Allis-Chalmers team became overconfident, cut down its work pace, lost the contest and the contract.

Caterpillar Sales Manager W. Kenneth Cox, Botts's real-life counterpart, once discovered a competitor listening in on his conversation from an adjoining restaurant booth. By loudly discussing a distant contractor as a ripe sales prospect, he sent his eager rival off on a 400-mile wild-goose chase. Another salesman learned that a contractor in his territory was devoutly religious, boned up on the Bible before seeing him. Said the salesman on finding the contractor building a new church, "Say, brother. You're doing the work of the Lord." The salesman dropped a few Biblical verses, so impressed the contractor that he was invited to preach a Sunday sermon at the new church. He preached a hellfire sermon, ended up selling his prospect two tractors instead of one. Then he went to the nearest hotel and celebrated the sale with a jug of Prohibition whisky.

New Family. Road building got one of its biggest boosts from another deeply religious contractor named Robert Gilmour LeTourneau, who made "a deal with God" to turn over 90% of his personal earnings to the church. In the 19303, when road building was spurred by the huge WPA and PWA road projects, he switched to manufacturing earthmovers, became the first to put pneumatic tires on the steel wheels of tractors, scrapers, etc., thus enabling them to move quickly over highways and do the job faster. Despite the Depression, some earthmoving manufacturers doubled and tripled their sales; LeTourneau's jumped 1,026% in only three years. The first superhighways, Connecticut's Merritt Parkway (started in 1934) and the Pennsylvania Turnpike (1938), became showplaces for the new dozers, scrapers and pavers--and the whole new family of road-building equipment that grew up with them.

War & Revolution. It took World War II to show road builders what their machines could do, set. off the technological revolution that produced today's giants. Bulldozers cleared the beaches, hauled artillery, built airstrips almost overnight, raised their blades as shields against bullets, and stormed Japanese positions. Admiral William ("Bull") Halsey ticked off the bulldozer as one of the four machines that won the war in the Pacific (the others: the submarine, the airplane, radar). Since then, manufacturers have steadily added power for greater speed and heavier loads; the average horsepower of today's tractor is 230 v. 130 in 1948--and still rising. Pneumatic tires, long confined almost entirely to LeTourneau equipment, became standard on most machines. Despite the size of today's juggernauts, power steering and other gadgets make a 30-ton machine almost as easy to maneuver as a cart in a supermarket.

Army on the Move. Though road building seems a jumble of confusion to the passing motorist, each machine has its own job to do in the mechanical army on the march. Foremen in jeeps hustle back and forth along the road, keeping in constant touch with field headquarters by two-way radio, instantly summoning machines for new jobs, mechanics for repairs. Growling bulldozers and rubber-wheeled scrapers with pelicanlike scoops clear and level the land. Compacters with huge rubber wheels or dozens of small steel feet pack down the loose dirt of the roadbed. Power shovels and 100-ft.-tall cranes with draglines are brought in to cut and eat through steep hills, swing out huge boulders, lift girders in place for bridges. Agile graders pare the shoulders and side slopes while ditchers with endless chains of buckets scoop out trenches for drainpipes. Then come the stone-crushing plants that can turn boulders into egg-sized aggregate for the road's foundation. After them come the pavers. For a concrete road, the paver moves along one side of the road, shooting out buckets of concrete on overhead rails; for asphalt, the paver straddles the roadbed, moving along as fast as 102 ft. a minute. Finally, the finishing machines smooth the completed road, and concrete saws neatly cut the joints needed for expansion and contraction.

Tough Competition. Chief among the firms whose technology and invention shaped and formed the art of road building is Caterpillar Tractor Co. of Peoria, EL, the industry's undisputed leader (1956 sales: $686 million, up 200% from 1947-49). Caterpillar early took the lead in the industry--and never lost it. It spent $1,000,000 in research to develop the first diesel tractor during the Depression, has since designed increasingly heavy, speedy and versatile crawlers. (Its newest model, the Dg, is a 320-h.p., 30-ton giant powerful enough to push or pull a 6.4-mile line of automobiles.) Today Cat manufactures 153 different machines for every use from agriculture to dam building, and there is scarcely a major road project in the U.S. where the telltale yellow of its powerful crawlers, big-bellied scrapers and grasshopper graders is not in sight. To keep Cat out front, President H. S. Eberhard is planning a $200 million plant expansion for the next three years, hopes to boost production 45% and to gross $1 billion by 1959.

Never before has Caterpillar had so much tough competition to keep ahead of. General Motors acquired Euclid Road Machinery Co. in 1953 to apply its automobile know-how to road-building equipment, pioneered twin-engined crawlers and scrapers, quickly pushed itself into the big five among equipment manufacturers. Philadelphia's Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton, longtime locomotive manufacturer, switched to road-building equipment, this year expects its construction sales to top $70 million. Dozens of companies manufacturing everything from spinning machines to television towers are starting to make road-building equipment. Westinghouse Air Brake Co. bought the earth-moving division of his company from Pioneer Bob LeTourneau, who agreed not to build earthmovers for a five-year period ending next May. Bob LeTourneau is itching to get back into the field, hints that he will produce some machines to open the industry's eyes: "As far as earth-moving machines go, they ain't seen nothing yet."

Faced with declining farm sales, farm-equipment manufacturers have moved deeper into road building. International Harvester, No. 1 U.S. farm implementer, last year boosted its construction-equipment sales to 16.6% of total sales v. 12.7% in 1955, is now second in the basic earthmover line. Other companies are specializing to meet the requirements of the federal program. Milwaukee's Harnischfeger Corp. found that 25,000 bridges will be needed in the federal highway network (bridge builders will get 25%-30% of the highway cost). It has developed an extra-high-capacity mobile crane to raise precast sections.

Wheelbarrow to Millionaire. The magnitude of modern road building and the steadily rising cost of new equipment (up nearly 70% since 1947) have made it harder for the smaller contractor to survive. Says Talbot Bailey, vice president of Oakland's Fredrickson & Watson Construction Co.: "There used to be a time when you could just take a wheelbarrow and start out in this business--and work up to be a millionaire. Those days are gone forever. You need a lot of capital today." In the '30s a mile of concrete road could be laid for $30,000; but the federal highway program will cost almost $1,000,000 a mile, and some sections of the new highways, such as downtown Boston's Fitzgerald Expressway, may run as high as $50 million.

In the tough competition for contracts, in which a penny's difference in the cost of moving a yard of dirt can be the margin between profit and loss, road builders must use all the machines -- roughly $1 worth of equipment for every dollar's worth of earth moved (about 3 cu. yd. at current costs). On modern highways an average of a million cu. yd. a mile is moved.

Despite their drain on the contractor's pocket, the machines that cost as much as $100,000 apiece save plenty of money in the long run. Contractors can get 66% more work with the same labor force as only nine years ago. Today's machine operator is a specialist who may make up to $15,000 a year, and it costs little more to have him operate a larger machine that can do more work. Since the average machine pays for itself long before wearing out, contractors figure they can afford $30,000 in new equipment to eliminate one man.

Graft & Patronage. Not even the efficient behemoths, however, can eliminate all the road builder's problems. He must fight a tight-money market to finance his equipment buying, deal with a welter of conflicting and often obsolete state regulations. Road building has always been blighted by graft, ranging from political kickbacks for contracts to small bribes to persuade local police to let the huge machines move over restricted roads to their job sites. Says Pittsburgh Contractor Max Harrison: "When I started out in this business in 1923 everyone connected with it was a crook." While the crooks have become fewer as more and more contracts have been let by competitive bidding, graft and political jobs for incompetents are sure to plague the federal highway program. Road-building scandals have already cropped up in Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania, and the Government has temporarily cut off funds from Indiana because of corruption in the buying of land for the new highways.

The biggest problem facing both manufacturer and contractor is impatience. The superhighway program requires many months of preparation--planning, surveying, contracting, acquiring rights of way--before big-scale work can begin. While the states must pass legislation for the 10% of the cost they will raise, many of them have not yet made arrangements to participate in the program. Contracts have so far been let for only 1,000 of the 41,000 projected miles, and only 200 miles have been completed. Though Federal Highway Administrator Bertram D. Tallamy says the program is proceeding on schedule, equipment manufacturers and contractors find it slower than expected. Some manufacturers have been forced to cut back production temporarily while waiting for the program to get rolling.

Years Beyond. For the earthmovers--and the men who make and operate them --the federal program will be only the first giant step in meeting the long-range needs of the nation. By the time the federal program is finished in 1972 (or a few years later, should Congress decide to stretch it out), most of the U.S. roads now in use will be obsolete and in need of rebuilding. Last year 80,000 miles of federal highways alone became obsolete, and thousands of miles of asphalt road built in the '20s are due to outlive their usefulness in the late '50s. Thus, the road-building industry can look forward to a long-range boom that will extend many years beyond 1972.

* A Senate subcommittee voted to expand the planned 41,000-mile route to 48,000 miles to satisfy state requests, add $15.4 billion to the cost, delay completion until 1979. But no action has yet been taken on the measure by Congress.

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