Descendants of Cummins founder and influential inventor Clessie Cummins are coming “home” to celebrate the company’s 100th birthday.
Company officials estimate that about 90 members of the Cummins family, including Clessie’s son Lyle Cummins and grandson Matt Cummins, who both live in Oregon, will arrive in Columbus next week for the celebration.
Cummins is inviting its employees (current and former) and their families, an estimated 13,000 people, to a celebration in downtown Columbus on June 15, but the event is not open to the public.
On June 13, Cummins will fly Lyle Cummins, who is 88 years old and lives in Wilsonville, Oregon, and his wife Jeanne to Columbus.
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“It’s an honor to be invited,” he said. “But I think the most important thing is to see how dad’s legacy has been remembered.”
Lyle’s son, Matt, however, has opted to make the 3,400-mile journey to Columbus from the Portland, Oregon area in a 1999 Dodge Ram 2500 equipped with a Cummins diesel engine that has nearly 300,000 miles already on it.
He said he will leave on today and arrive in Columbus three days later, with stops in Denver and the Kansas City area. Matt Cummins said he will travel with his grade school friend Pete Hazel. Matt Cummins’ wife and children will make the trip to Indiana in an airplane.
“I hope I get there in one piece,” Matt Cummins said while laughing when considering his road trip plans. “I’ve been to Columbus several times, and my kids are growing up and I just want to make sure that they have a memory of this event and what the town was like and what their great-grandfather was like.”
Lyle Cummins said he has fond memories of living in Columbus. The Cummins family lived in a house at 718 Seventh St. for the better part of 15 years from 1930 to 1945, just a stone’s throw from Central Middle School. In 1945, the family moved to California.
“You just felt at home,” Lyle Cummins said of living in Columbus. “It was a very welcoming community.”
Drawn to engines
Born in 1888, Clessie Cummins grew up on a family farm in Indiana. He was drawn to engines as a child. At 11 years of age, Clessie Cummins built his first steam engine, according to the Columbus Area Visitors Center. He later worked as the chauffeur and mechanic for Columbus banker William G. Irwin.
On Feb. 3, 1919, Clessie Cummins founded Cummins Engine Co. with the financial support of Irwin, according to the company’s website. The company was one of the first to take advantage of the groundbreaking technology developed by German engineer Rudolf Diesel in the late 1800s.
By 1936, the company had reached $1 million in sales (worth approximately $18.2 million today when adjusted for inflation). The company has since expanded beyond diesel engines. Its product lines range from diesel and natural gas engines to hybrid and electric platforms, engine systems components, controls and other related technologies. The company continues to develop new advanced products and services.
The company now has more than 6,000 distributor and dealer locations in more than 190 countries, according to the company’s website. The company reported a record $23.8 billion in revenues last year, a 16 percent increase from the year before.
Clessie Cummins died in 1968, leaving behind a legacy described in automotive circles as “the father of the American diesel truck engine.” During his career, Clessie was awarded 33 patents for his inventions, including several fuel injection systems and the first ever compression release engine brake.
Clessie Cummins was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1973. His hall of fame listing says he was “the first American to build and install diesel engines in trucks, buses and passenger cars.”
‘A hair-raising trip’
Among the many Clessie Cummins’ notable achievements was the invention of the compressed release engine brake, also known as the “Jake brake.”
He was motivated to create the now-commonplace braking mechanism because of a near-death experience while attempting to set a coast-to-coast truck speed record in 1931, Lyle Cummins said.
In August 1931, Clessie Cummins embarked on the 3,214-mile, cross-country trip from New York to Los Angeles in a Cummins diesel-powered truck — with the Cummins diesel race car that participated in the 1931 Indianapolis 500 loaded onto it. The race car had completed the race without making a single pit stop, finishing 13th out of 33 drivers.
Clessie Cummins didn’t run into trouble until he reached the Cajon Pass on Route 66. The Cajon Pass is a mountain passage between the San Bernardino Mountains and the St. Gabriel Mountains in southern California, approximately 64 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Part of the pass included a long, steep downhill grade as the highway descended into the city of San Bernardino, Lyle Cummins said.
“The truck didn’t have enough brakes on the back, and on the long grade into San Bernardino, he lost the brakes and drove it down (the pass) by the skin of his teeth dodging this, that and the other,” Lyle Cummins said. “It was a hair-raising trip. In fact, he had some scars on his back for years because of (the incident).”
“He vowed then and there after that runaway truck experience that he would make the engine act as a retarder,” Lyle Cummins said.
In response to the incident, Clessie Cummins would come up with a solution in 1957 — a compression release engine brake, which is a braking mechanism that can be installed on a diesel engine to help slow down the vehicle without the use of the foot brakes.
When engaged, the engine brake turns the engine into an air compressor that absorbs power. It does this by opening the engine’s exhaust valve just before the engine’s power stroke, releasing the compressed gas that would have created the energy needed to drive the vehicle forward.
Lyle Cummins said he helped his father with the brake’s designs and patent drawings, among other things.
“Dad was the idea man and, of course, guided me in a lot of things,” Lyle Cummins said. “I worked on a lot of brake designs. I went through the field testing, and dad tried to find a home for the brake.”
After being turned down by companies in Indiana and Michigan, Clessie Cummins found a home for the device at Jacobs Vehicle Systems, which gave rise to the device’s nickname, the “Jake brake.” The product went on the market in 1961 and would become commonplace on many long haul trucks and buses.
“He was a triple threat kind of guy,” Lyle Cummins said of his father. “It wasn’t just his ability to create and innovate, it was his ability to choose people — his friends, his colleagues — and his sense of what was going on in the market. You don’t run into a lot of people like that.”
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Clessie Cummins
Born: Dec. 27, 1888
Education: No formal education beyond the eighth grade
Achievements:
- Became the first American to build and install diesel engines in trucks, buses and passenger cars
- Patented 30 products and processes including many fuel injection systems for his engines
- Built and operated a steam engine at the age of 11.
- Founded Cummins Engine Co. in 1919
- Entered a Cummins diesel-powered racecar in the Indianapolis 500 in 1931, placing 13th without a pit stop.
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To read a timeline of Cummins’ past 100 years, visit: cummins.com/timeline.
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Cummins Inc.
Products: Designs, manufactures, sells and services diesel and alternative-fuel engines and electrical generator sets, and related components and technology.
Headquarters: Columbus, Indiana
Founded: 1919, by mechanic Clessie Cummins and banker William G. Irwin
2018 revenue: $23.8 billion
2018 profit: $2.1 billion
Employees: 62,000 worldwide, more than 10,000 of whom work in Indiana
Source: Cummins
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Cummins is inviting its employees (current and former) and their families, an estimated 13,000 people, to an anniversary celebration in downtown Columbus on June 15.
The event is not open to the public, company officials said.
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