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$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 5½ 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.