Born December 27, 1888 and died August 17, 1968 was a great American business man who was responsible for creating the Cummins Diesel engine.
Born and raised as a farm boy from Indiana, Clessie has a reason to create any means of simplifying the tough life of a farmer and the processes of the trade.
Cummins Engine Company was founded in 1919 by Clessie Cummins and is still a profitable American success story today. The Dodge pickup line has been a major supporter of the Cummins design or the last couple decades. Even today this American founded company resides in Columbus Ohio and employees thousands of hard working people.
Cummins' roots are planted in soil nourished by innovation, persistence and a commitment to community. Founded in Columbus, Ind., in 1919 as Cummins Engine Company, for its namesake Clessie Lyle Cummins, the fledgling firm was among the first to see the commercial potential of an unproven engine technology invented two decades earlier by Rudolph Diesel.
Fortunately for Clessie Cummins, a self-taught mechanic and inventor, his vision was shared by someone with the financial resources to make it a reality: William Glanton (W.G.) Irwin, a successful local banker and investor, who already had provided financial backing for Cummins' auto mechanic operation and machine shop.
After a decade of fits and starts, during which time the diesel engine failed to take hold as a commercial success, a stroke of marketing genius by Clessie Cummins helped save the Company. Cummins mounted a diesel engine in a used Packard limousine and on Christmas day in 1929 took W.G. Irwin for a ride in America's first diesel-powered automobile. Irwin's enthusiasm for the new engine led to an infusion of cash into the Company, which helped fuel a number of speed and endurance records in the coming years - including a grueling 13,535-mile run at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1931. Such feats earned Cummins' foothold as an engine supplier to the trucking industry.
Still, publicity alone could not carry the Company; Cummins needed reliable products and a sound business organization. In 1933, the company released the Model H, a powerful engine for transportation that launched the company's most successful engine family. J. Irwin Miller, great-nephew of W.G. Irwin, became general manager in 1934 and went on to lead the company to international prominence over the next four decades. By marketing high-quality products through a unique nationwide service organization, the Company earned its first profit in 1937. Three years later, Cummins offered the industry's first 100,000-mile warranty.
By the 1950s, America had embarked on a massive interstate highway construction program, with Cummins engines powering much of the equipment that built the roads and thousands of the trucks that began to roll down them. Truckers demanded economy, power, reliability, and durability, and Cummins responded. By combining lab-based research and field-based trials, including dramatic performances at the Indy 500 races, Cummins achieved technological breakthroughs, including the revolutionary PT (pressure-time) fuel injection system of 1954. By the late 1950s, Cummins had sales of over $100 million and a commanding lead in the market for heavy truck diesels.
As Cummins continued to grow its business in the United States, the Company also began looking beyond its traditional borders. Cummins opened its first foreign manufacturing facility in Shotts, Scotland, in 1956 and by the end of the 1960s, Cummins had expanded its sales and service network to 2,500 dealers in 98 countries. Today, Cummins has more than 5,000 facilities in 197 countries and territories.
Cummins, led by the visionary leadership of J. Irwin Miller, forged strong ties to emerging countries such as China, India and Brazil, where Cummins had a major presence before most other U.S. multinational companies. Cummins has grown into one of the largest engine makers in both China and India, and for the past three years approximately half of the Company’s sales have been generated outside the United States.
Image result for cummins
Cummins is no longer just an engine business, but a global power leader with more than $17 billion in sales in 2013. We are a family of inter-related, yet diversified businesses that create or enhance value as a result of doing business with each other or having those relationships.
Cummins is organized around four business segments - Engine, Power Generation, Components Business and Distribution – and provides products and service to customers in more than 150 countries.
Cummins is a technology leader in the diesel engine market, with our employees working relentlessly to provide cutting-edge solutions to the increasingly difficult challenge of producing cleaner-running engines. For example, Cummins was the only company in the industry to meet the 2010 EPA standards for NOx emissions with the release in early 2007 of its new 6.7-liter turbo diesel for the Dodge Ram Heavy Duty pickup.
Clessie Cummins' spirit of innovation and commitment to quality lives on nearly a century later in the nearly 46,000 Cummins employees who work to design, make and sell products that can be found in nearly every type of vehicle imaginable.
Image result for jake brake
Another of Clessie Cummins inventions is the 'Jake Brake'. The jake brake is a compression releasing device on the engine that when engaged uses the motion of the fuel injector lobe on the cam shaft to open the exhaust valve of the engine at the top of the pistons travel, and in the point of peak compression. Letting all the compression out effectively slows down the engine because it has to work hard to build that compression and its then released instead of being used to drive the piston around. Clessie saw the need of an engine break one day when he was decending a hill too fast and began to loose control.
In Clessies words:
“About dusk on the fifth day, we reached the top of Cajon Pass west of Barstow, California. Before retiring to the sleeping compartment, Dave had warned me against this thirty-five-mile stretch of mountainous downgrade. I failed to register when the sign for the Cajon Pass appeared. Soon, however, I realized my error. The brakes wouldn't hold. Now running in third gear, I tried desperately to get into a lower speed. Nothing doing, I saw I would just have to ride it out. I suddenly saw something moving across the road ahead. I realized with new alarm that a freight train was cutting across our path. As we raced inexorably toward the crossing and doom, the trains caboose loomed out of the darkness. Its red lights cleared the highway just as we reached the tracks. We had escaped certain death by inches.”
Clessie never forgot that night and how close he came to crashing into that train. He made a promise to himself that he would find a way to make his engine hold you back on a hill as well as it pulled you up a hill.
An idea for a practical method came to Clessie in 1957 while in Phoenix Arizona. The idea that hit Clessie revolved around taking advantage of perfectly timed motion already built into Cummins and Detroit Diesel engines; these engines have a third cam on the main camshaft that activates the fuel injector of each cylinder. A simple retrofit mechanism should be able to transfer this motion to open the exhaust valve. An important subtlety of the invention made it novel enough that a very broad patent was ultimately granted, affording strong patent protection dating from the time of its application at the U.S. Patent Office.
The vehicle selected for the first field tests of the completed device was a 1955 GMC “Suburban” station wagon re-powered with a Cummins JN-6 diesel engine. The engine had a displacement of 401 cubic inches and was rated at 125 BHP at 2,500 rpm. But since the major market potential was in the Cummins NH series diesels at that time, the engine brake mechanism was scaled up and adapted to a Cummins NHRS supercharged model of 300BHP at 2,100 rpm. The chief reason for selecting this model was simply because a pair of these diesel engines were installed in Clessies 96-foot yacht Canim based in Sausalito harbor.
Although the principles were proved by mechanically transferring the injector motion, a more practical method was to use a fully hydraulic motion and force transfer. The first retarder housings of the prototype design were installed on a Cummins diesel engine in a truck owned and operated by the Sheldon Oil Company. The initial run with the engine brake was to one of their plants just at the eastern base of the grade, down the Sierras on U.S. Highway 50 near Lake Tahoe. Bill Hill, an eighteen-year veteran driver for Sheldon said he normally was forced to pass the turnoff on the job site because of faded brakes; he would come back when he could slow down enough to turn around! With the engine brake the turnoff was easily made, and the brake drums were barely warm to the touch. Bill said he never wanted to drive a truck again unless it was equipped with Clessie Cummins new invention.
As a result of prior contractual arrangement, Clessie was obligated to show his ideas first to Cummins Engine Company. The novelty of the idea, which broke into untried mechanical areas, plus the uncertainty of its commercial merit caused it to be rejected by Cummins Engine Company. Nonetheless, Clessie was not discouraged, because he also was thinking about starting a small company to manufacture the brake himself.
Clessiess brother Deloss Cummins, once service manager of Cummins Engine Company, lived in Phoenix, where he and a partner ran a successful Cummins engine distributorship. He visited Clessie occasionally in Sausalito and knew of the ongoing “basement” activities. Deloss son Don was serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, with one of his last stations being in New London, Connecticut. The Cummins Engine company distributor in nearby Hartford was a good friend of Deloss and had known Don for years. This resulted in an invitation to Don to come to Hartford; naturally the visit would be more pleasant if Don could also spend some time there with a person more his age. Thus a blind date with the daughter of a good friend was arranged. The girls father, Bob Englund, also happened to be a Vice President of Jacobs Manufacturing Company, the world's leading manufacturer of drill chucks. There was a natural attraction between Don Cummins and Roberta Englund, and in due course wedding bells were heard.
Don knew through his dad that Uncle Clessie was working on some kind of engine brake, and the word eventually reached the ears of Jacobs Manufacturing Companys President Louis Stoner. Just weeks before the Sheldon Oil Company test began, a letter was received in Sausalito asking if the Mr. Stoner could come to California to see what invention Clessie had under development. A demonstration of the brake on the boat engine during a yacht ride on San Francisco Bay, excited the visitors to the point that agreement was soon reached to build brake assemblies for ten engines as quickly as possible from drawings that Clessie's son Lyle provided. Consolidated Freightways, Pacific Intermountain Express, Willig, Sheldon, Q-N-C, and other trucking firms kindly furnished the trucks. While several minor problems appeared, the tests demonstrated conclusively the engine brakes improved, safer operation, as well as a large potential cost savings in brake linings and drums.
In April of 1960, Jacobs Mfg. Company made the decision to establish its new Clessie L. Cummins Division, (now named Jacobs Vehicle Systems) for the manufacture of the engine brake. The first production units for the Cummins NH series engines left the factory in 1961, followed shortly by a brake for the Detroit 71 series.
Clessie Cummins idea for making a diesel engine work downhill as well as uphill has thus been implemented. The Jake Brake engine brake has become a major contributor to greater control and safer operation of heavy trucks worldwide. The Jacobs Engine Brake is the 81st National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark designated since the program began in 1973, representing a progressive step in the evolution of mechanical engineering, and an influence on society.
Over 50 years later, the same basic principles of varying the engine exhaust valve timing for engine braking are in use in nearly all over the road heavy-duty trucks. And Jacobs remains the leader, providing the highest quality, highest performance engine brakes on the market.
Clessie Cummins
Born December 27, 1888 and died August 17, 1968 was a great American business man who was responsible for creating the Cummins Diesel engine.
Born and raised as a farm boy from Indiana, Clessie has a reason to create any means of simplifying the tough life of a farmer and the processes of the trade.
Cummins Engine Company was founded in 1919 by Clessie Cummins and is still a profitable American success story today. The Dodge pickup line has been a major supporter of the Cummins design or the last couple decades. Even today this American founded company resides in Columbus Ohio and employees thousands of hard working people.
Cummins' roots are planted in soil nourished by innovation, persistence and a commitment to community. Founded in Columbus, Ind., in 1919 as Cummins Engine Company, for its namesake Clessie Lyle Cummins, the fledgling firm was among the first to see the commercial potential of an unproven engine technology invented two decades earlier by Rudolph Diesel.
Fortunately for Clessie Cummins, a self-taught mechanic and inventor, his vision was shared by someone with the financial resources to make it a reality: William Glanton (W.G.) Irwin, a successful local banker and investor, who already had provided financial backing for Cummins' auto mechanic operation and machine shop.
After a decade of fits and starts, during which time the diesel engine failed to take hold as a commercial success, a stroke of marketing genius by Clessie Cummins helped save the Company. Cummins mounted a diesel engine in a used Packard limousine and on Christmas day in 1929 took W.G. Irwin for a ride in America's first diesel-powered automobile. Irwin's enthusiasm for the new engine led to an infusion of cash into the Company, which helped fuel a number of speed and endurance records in the coming years - including a grueling 13,535-mile run at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1931. Such feats earned Cummins' foothold as an engine supplier to the trucking industry.
Still, publicity alone could not carry the Company; Cummins needed reliable products and a sound business organization. In 1933, the company released the Model H, a powerful engine for transportation that launched the company's most successful engine family. J. Irwin Miller, great-nephew of W.G. Irwin, became general manager in 1934 and went on to lead the company to international prominence over the next four decades. By marketing high-quality products through a unique nationwide service organization, the Company earned its first profit in 1937. Three years later, Cummins offered the industry's first 100,000-mile warranty.
By the 1950s, America had embarked on a massive interstate highway construction program, with Cummins engines powering much of the equipment that built the roads and thousands of the trucks that began to roll down them. Truckers demanded economy, power, reliability, and durability, and Cummins responded. By combining lab-based research and field-based trials, including dramatic performances at the Indy 500 races, Cummins achieved technological breakthroughs, including the revolutionary PT (pressure-time) fuel injection system of 1954. By the late 1950s, Cummins had sales of over $100 million and a commanding lead in the market for heavy truck diesels.
As Cummins continued to grow its business in the United States, the Company also began looking beyond its traditional borders. Cummins opened its first foreign manufacturing facility in Shotts, Scotland, in 1956 and by the end of the 1960s, Cummins had expanded its sales and service network to 2,500 dealers in 98 countries. Today, Cummins has more than 5,000 facilities in 197 countries and territories.
Cummins, led by the visionary leadership of J. Irwin Miller, forged strong ties to emerging countries such as China, India and Brazil, where Cummins had a major presence before most other U.S. multinational companies. Cummins has grown into one of the largest engine makers in both China and India, and for the past three years approximately half of the Company’s sales have been generated outside the United States.
Cummins is no longer just an engine business, but a global power leader with more than $17 billion in sales in 2013. We are a family of inter-related, yet diversified businesses that create or enhance value as a result of doing business with each other or having those relationships.
Cummins is organized around four business segments - Engine, Power Generation, Components Business and Distribution – and provides products and service to customers in more than 150 countries.
Cummins is a technology leader in the diesel engine market, with our employees working relentlessly to provide cutting-edge solutions to the increasingly difficult challenge of producing cleaner-running engines. For example, Cummins was the only company in the industry to meet the 2010 EPA standards for NOx emissions with the release in early 2007 of its new 6.7-liter turbo diesel for the Dodge Ram Heavy Duty pickup.
Clessie Cummins' spirit of innovation and commitment to quality lives on nearly a century later in the nearly 46,000 Cummins employees who work to design, make and sell products that can be found in nearly every type of vehicle imaginable.
Another of Clessie Cummins inventions is the 'Jake Brake'. The jake brake is a compression releasing device on the engine that when engaged uses the motion of the fuel injector lobe on the cam shaft to open the exhaust valve of the engine at the top of the pistons travel, and in the point of peak compression. Letting all the compression out effectively slows down the engine because it has to work hard to build that compression and its then released instead of being used to drive the piston around. Clessie saw the need of an engine break one day when he was decending a hill too fast and began to loose control.
In Clessies words:“About dusk on the fifth day, we reached the top of Cajon Pass west of Barstow, California. Before retiring to the sleeping compartment, Dave had warned me against this thirty-five-mile stretch of mountainous downgrade. I failed to register when the sign for the Cajon Pass appeared. Soon, however, I realized my error. The brakes wouldn't hold. Now running in third gear, I tried desperately to get into a lower speed. Nothing doing, I saw I would just have to ride it out. I suddenly saw something moving across the road ahead. I realized with new alarm that a freight train was cutting across our path. As we raced inexorably toward the crossing and doom, the trains caboose loomed out of the darkness. Its red lights cleared the highway just as we reached the tracks. We had escaped certain death by inches.”
Clessie never forgot that night and how close he came to crashing into that train. He made a promise to himself that he would find a way to make his engine hold you back on a hill as well as it pulled you up a hill.
An idea for a practical method came to Clessie in 1957 while in Phoenix Arizona. The idea that hit Clessie revolved around taking advantage of perfectly timed motion already built into Cummins and Detroit Diesel engines; these engines have a third cam on the main camshaft that activates the fuel injector of each cylinder. A simple retrofit mechanism should be able to transfer this motion to open the exhaust valve. An important subtlety of the invention made it novel enough that a very broad patent was ultimately granted, affording strong patent protection dating from the time of its application at the U.S. Patent Office.
The vehicle selected for the first field tests of the completed device was a 1955 GMC “Suburban” station wagon re-powered with a Cummins JN-6 diesel engine. The engine had a displacement of 401 cubic inches and was rated at 125 BHP at 2,500 rpm. But since the major market potential was in the Cummins NH series diesels at that time, the engine brake mechanism was scaled up and adapted to a Cummins NHRS supercharged model of 300BHP at 2,100 rpm. The chief reason for selecting this model was simply because a pair of these diesel engines were installed in Clessies 96-foot yacht Canim based in Sausalito harbor.
Although the principles were proved by mechanically transferring the injector motion, a more practical method was to use a fully hydraulic motion and force transfer. The first retarder housings of the prototype design were installed on a Cummins diesel engine in a truck owned and operated by the Sheldon Oil Company. The initial run with the engine brake was to one of their plants just at the eastern base of the grade, down the Sierras on U.S. Highway 50 near Lake Tahoe. Bill Hill, an eighteen-year veteran driver for Sheldon said he normally was forced to pass the turnoff on the job site because of faded brakes; he would come back when he could slow down enough to turn around! With the engine brake the turnoff was easily made, and the brake drums were barely warm to the touch. Bill said he never wanted to drive a truck again unless it was equipped with Clessie Cummins new invention.
As a result of prior contractual arrangement, Clessie was obligated to show his ideas first to Cummins Engine Company. The novelty of the idea, which broke into untried mechanical areas, plus the uncertainty of its commercial merit caused it to be rejected by Cummins Engine Company. Nonetheless, Clessie was not discouraged, because he also was thinking about starting a small company to manufacture the brake himself.
Clessiess brother Deloss Cummins, once service manager of Cummins Engine Company, lived in Phoenix, where he and a partner ran a successful Cummins engine distributorship. He visited Clessie occasionally in Sausalito and knew of the ongoing “basement” activities. Deloss son Don was serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, with one of his last stations being in New London, Connecticut. The Cummins Engine company distributor in nearby Hartford was a good friend of Deloss and had known Don for years. This resulted in an invitation to Don to come to Hartford; naturally the visit would be more pleasant if Don could also spend some time there with a person more his age. Thus a blind date with the daughter of a good friend was arranged. The girls father, Bob Englund, also happened to be a Vice President of Jacobs Manufacturing Company, the world's leading manufacturer of drill chucks. There was a natural attraction between Don Cummins and Roberta Englund, and in due course wedding bells were heard.
Don knew through his dad that Uncle Clessie was working on some kind of engine brake, and the word eventually reached the ears of Jacobs Manufacturing Companys President Louis Stoner. Just weeks before the Sheldon Oil Company test began, a letter was received in Sausalito asking if the Mr. Stoner could come to California to see what invention Clessie had under development. A demonstration of the brake on the boat engine during a yacht ride on San Francisco Bay, excited the visitors to the point that agreement was soon reached to build brake assemblies for ten engines as quickly as possible from drawings that Clessie's son Lyle provided. Consolidated Freightways, Pacific Intermountain Express, Willig, Sheldon, Q-N-C, and other trucking firms kindly furnished the trucks. While several minor problems appeared, the tests demonstrated conclusively the engine brakes improved, safer operation, as well as a large potential cost savings in brake linings and drums.
In April of 1960, Jacobs Mfg. Company made the decision to establish its new Clessie L. Cummins Division, (now named Jacobs Vehicle Systems) for the manufacture of the engine brake. The first production units for the Cummins NH series engines left the factory in 1961, followed shortly by a brake for the Detroit 71 series.
Clessie Cummins idea for making a diesel engine work downhill as well as uphill has thus been implemented. The Jake Brake engine brake has become a major contributor to greater control and safer operation of heavy trucks worldwide. The Jacobs Engine Brake is the 81st National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark designated since the program began in 1973, representing a progressive step in the evolution of mechanical engineering, and an influence on society.
Over 50 years later, the same basic principles of varying the engine exhaust valve timing for engine braking are in use in nearly all over the road heavy-duty trucks. And Jacobs remains the leader, providing the highest quality, highest performance engine brakes on the market.
resources:
http://www.cummins.com/about-us/history/in-words
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clessie_Cummins
http://www.cummins.com/about-us/history/in-words
http://www.jacobsvehiclesystems.com/about-us/history/