Two California rivals and a nickname that became a name.

The Caterpillar name is older than the Caterpillar company. English Wikipedia traces the business to the steam tractors that the Holt Manufacturing Company built in 1890 around Stockton, California, machines that worked the soft farmland of the San Joaquin Valley. It says Benjamin Holt replaced the wheels of one of his steamers with a set of wooden tracks bolted to chains and tested the machine on 24 November 1904.

Wikipedia credits the nickname to the company photographer Charles Clements, who is said to have remarked that the track rising and falling over its rollers looked like a caterpillar; Wikipedia also records an attribution of the name to British soldiers who watched trials of a tracked tractor made by Hornsby in England. Either way, the word stuck. Wikipedia says Pliny learned of an empty factory from Murray Baker, a farm-implement dealer who later became executive vice president of the Caterpillar Tractor Company. Wikipedia records that Pliny Holt, Benjamin’s nephew, bought a factory in East Peoria, Illinois, on 25 October 1909, incorporated it as the Holt Caterpillar Company, and that the name Caterpillar was registered as a trademark on 2 August 1910.

The other half of the story begins with Clarence Leo Best. Wikipedia says he formed the C. L. Best Gas Traction Company in 1910, and that for years his firm and Holt’s fought each other through contract, trademark and patent lawsuits. In 1925 the Holt Manufacturing Company and the C. L. Best Tractor Company merged to form the Caterpillar Tractor Company. Wikipedia says the new company was headquartered in San Leandro, California, until 1930, when under the terms of the merger it moved to Peoria, Illinois, and that Best ran the company until October 1951. It adds that the merged company’s early range combined Holt’s 2 Ton, 5 Ton and 10 Ton tractors with Best’s Caterpillar Thirty and Caterpillar Sixty.

A reorganised company and three headquarters towns.

For most of the twentieth century Caterpillar was a Peoria company. Wikipedia describes Peoria as the historical manufacturing home of the business and the long-time location of its world headquarters and research. In 1986, it says, the company reorganised as a Delaware corporation under its current name, Caterpillar Inc.

The headquarters then moved twice in five years. Wikipedia records that in January 2017 Caterpillar announced plans to move its headquarters from Peoria to Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. On 14 June 2022, the Associated Press reported that the company was transferring its global base from Deerfield to Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, and that it would begin the transition that year. The AP report noted that Caterpillar had been based in Peoria for over ninety years before the Deerfield announcement, that it already had an office in Irving and that it had been in Texas since the 1960s. It quoted chief executive Jim Umpleby: “We believe it’s in the best strategic interest of the company to make this move.”

The name also reached well beyond machinery. Wikipedia says Caterpillar sells the right to make and market products bearing the Cat trademark to licensees around the world, and that Wolverine World Wide has been a licensee since 1994, producing Cat-branded footwear. It records that the Cat name was licensed for a line of rugged mobile phones from 2012 to 2024, and that in 2002 Caterpillar licensed the use of the CAT name and its yellow livery to the German agricultural company Claas for combine harvesters sold in North America.

Design and documentation.

On farm and construction machinery, colour does a great deal of the identity work. A paint scheme carried across tractors, loaders and implements lets a machine be recognised across a field or a building site long before any badge can be read, and several equipment makers have treated their paint as a protected part of the brand, defending it as trade dress in the same way other companies defend a wordmark.

The decal is the second layer. Model numbers, wordmarks and stripes are usually applied as vinyl decals rather than cast badges, which is why restorers and collectors pay close attention to reproduction decal sets, and why a change of decal style often marks a new generation of machine as clearly as any change in the metal underneath.

Dealer signage carries the same identity to the roadside. Pole signs, fascia panels and branded service vans repeat the colours and wordmark at a scale meant to be read from a passing vehicle. Operator manuals, parts catalogues and safety labels then carry the typography and colour into the cab and the workshop, where the brand is read most often of all.

From gray and red to yellow and black.

The Caterpillar colour has a dated history, and the company’s own heritage team has told that story in print. In an October 2017 article for Peoria Magazine (then iBi), Lee Fosburgh of Caterpillar Corporate Heritage Services wrote that until 7 December 1931 Caterpillar equipment was gray with red trim. The company wanted a colour that would be visible at a distance by day and by night and still pleasing to the eye; the article says tests narrowed the field to a shady yellow, a flash red and white, and that “Hi-Way Yellow” was chosen. It adds that in the 1970s paint specialists devised a deeper yellow reserved for Cat machines, known today as “Caterpillar Yellow.” Wikipedia, for its part, describes the yellow livery and the CAT logo as the features by which the company’s machines and branded products are recognised.

The colour change came in a busy year. The same article says Caterpillar introduced the Auto Patrol motor grader in April 1931 and began producing the Diesel Sixty tractor in October 1931. Its engine traced back to a prototype nicknamed “Old Betsy,” which the article says was assembled in San Leandro on 28 June 1930 under the engineer C. G. A. Rosen and tested before it was judged ready for production. It also traces the trademark. It says the first Caterpillar mark, which had originally been used by the Holt Manufacturing Company, was known as the “Wavy Logo”: the name written in a wave-like script that suggested a crawling larva. In 1931 the company introduced a second, red trademark with a more contemporary design, which the article says stayed broadly the same, with adjustments, until 1957.

For a design guide, Caterpillar shows how a working colour chosen for roadside visibility can become the brand itself, carried onto licensed goods far from a building site. Compare Bobcat, a compact-equipment brand, and Kubota, a Japanese maker of farm and construction equipment. For this guide we use road yellow, trim black and a pre-1931 gray with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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