Cummins Inc., is a global corporation of complementary business units that collectively design, manufacture, distribute and support diesel engines and related technologies in a broad base of applications including on-highway, industrial, construction, recreational, marine, power-generation and other market sectors. Head quartered in Columbus, Indiana, (USA) Cummins serves customers in more than 160 countries through its network of distributor and dealer facilities and locations.
Cummins began life in Columbus, Indiana in 1919 and was known as the Cummins Engine Company, a name drawn from the man who first had the dream, Clessie Lyle Cummins.
Clessie Cummins was a self-taught mechanic, and a clever one it seems. With the financial backing of William Irwin, he was able to establish serious commercial potential for a technology originally identified by Rudolf Diesel many years earlier.
But it was ten years before Cummins was able to successfully demonstrate USA's first diesel-powered automobile and once this milestone passed, the race to build one of the world's greatest diesel engine manufacturers had already begun.
Today, Cummins engines are produced in many countries around the world including but not limited to USA, UK, China, India and Brazil. Additionally it has major remanufacturing plants in Mexico and Australia.By 2003, close to half of the company's sales were realized outside US borders.
Cummins no longer considers itself just an engine manufacturer, but rather a global power leader.
(You can buy the book "The Diesel Odyssey of Clessie Cummins" ISBN 0-917308-04-2 direct from Carnot Press, PO Box 1544, Lake Oswego, Oregon, USDA 97035. The book is the work of C. Lyle Cummins Jr. It will cost around US$50 in 2009 money.)
