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What made it worse was that few banks were anxious to risk money on a young, untried company. (Today, Morrison borrows as much as $200 million a year from banks and insurance companies spread across the U.S.. is so highly regarded that the Bank of America once wanted to handle all MK's business.) It took years of saving before M-K got its first big steam shovel.
Guernsey & Beyond. For young Harry Morrison, the machines opened up a new era. As the coughing, spitting machinery took over, the horses gradually disappeared. In 1939, Knudsen, tired and lost in the new technology, turned over M-K to Morrison. Four years later, he died.
With his shiny new equipment, Morrison joined the big Utah Construction Co. in 1925 on a joint bid for the $2,300,000 Guernsey Dam in Wyoming, followed it up with another for Deadwood Dam in the mountains of central Idaho. The experience gave M-K the know-how to tackle the biggest of them all in 1931—the Arizona-Nevada giant Hoover Dam that was to rise 726 ft. above the Colorado River, generate power at the rate of 4 billion kw. a year. On Deadwood, M-K used some of the first bulldozers, began testing diesel trucks, gas-powered revolving shovels, learned to haul equipment over mountains as high as 7,400 ft. on log roads. Even more important, MK's idea for joint ventures was a solution to the dam builders' growing financial problem: projects were so huge that few companies had the means or courage to tackle them since a single mistake might wipe them out. But in joint ventures, with many companies sharing costs and profits (or losses), construction men could aim at the moon.
For Hoover Dam, Harry Morrison put together the famed Six Companies, Inc.,—and contributed $500,000 as his share of the $5,000,000 capital. Looking back, he cannot help thinking that every dam since Hoover has been an anticlimax. "It's the glamour dam," he says wistfully. "I still can't go down in the elevator and step out on the intake and look up without being inspired." M-K introduced bulldozers to its partners at Hoover, wound up using 60 huge monsters. There, too, M-K showed off a new tunnel-driving technique using drill jumbos, great scaffolds on which men with 40 drills could hammer away at the same time, thus cutting costs drastically. Hoover was finished in five years, and MK's share of the $10.4 million profit was about $1,000,000.
Across the Pacific. Through the '30s, M-K worked on big dams: Bonneville (on the Washington-Oregon line), Imperial. Grand Coulee (Washington), a total construction effort of more than $300 million. M-K built the San Francisco side of the 4,620-ft. Bay Bridge, upped its railroad work to a steady $10 million a year. Despite the Depression, M-K showed a profit in every year except 1932 and 1937.
The company's gross shot from just under $9,000,000 in 1939 to a whopping $87 million in 1943. With seven other firms. M-K helped build the Navy's Pacific air-base program, spread runways and revetments in 28 different locations on a $1,160,000,000 contract, the biggest by any Government up to that time.