Robert Gilmore “R.G.” LeTourneau was born in 1888 to
godly parents. In his autobiography, he confesses
that as a youth he was “fanatically determined to amount to nothing” – and came
to Christ only in his later teen years.
He dropped out of school in the 8th grade to take a job
hauling sand for a foundry. He took an
interest in machines and how they worked, doing his best to dabble in the
machines at the foundry. During this
time as a young man, he stumbled across a syllabus and text for a course in
mechanics from the International Correspondence School. He didn’t take the tests and he didn’t pay
for the credits, but something stuck and he continued to dabble in
mechanics.
At age 21 he designed a “final exam” for himself. With no formal education, he disassembled and
reassembled a motorcycle within a day.
He declared he had a “Bachelor of Motorcycles” degree, a title he used
off-and-on the rest of his life.
After a brief stint in the Navy during World War I, he
bounced around looking for work. By age 30,
then married and in debt due to a failed business venture, he took a temporary job
fixing a farmer’s tractor. To prove it
worked, he used the tractor to level part of the farmer’s field. RG later said that this was the most
satisfying job he ever had.
R.G. began to get serious about his faith, and had a long
conversation with his pastor, asking about potential avenues to go into
pastoral or missionary work. His pastor
responded to him with the words, “R.G., God needs businessmen as well as
pastors.” This conversation set the direction
for the rest of his life, declaring that his business partner was God.
R.G. took the experience with leveling the farmer’s field
that he financed a similar tractor for himself and founded R.G. LeTourneau
Inc., an earth-moving company. He struggled
with work throughout the 1920s, trying his best to underbid competing companies
then inventing machines to move the earth more efficiently. He found himself deep in debt from a couple
of failed contracts and ended up having to sell a few of his machines to make
ends meet. R.G.’s debtors hired a man
named Mr Frost to go over his books and help him get his books back on track
and get to a state of profitability.
Frost arrived to a situation that, to his mind, was worse than he had
thought. Due to his faith, R.G. refused
to work on Sundays, and was committed to meet a missions pledge of $5,000 to
his church. To Frost’s amazement, God
brought in just enough business for R.G. to meet his commitments, though still
in debt.
R.G. considered himself to be, first and foremost in the
business of moving earth, but his creditors convinced him that instead of
rolling the dice on large construction jobs that he’d be better suited for
manufacturing and selling the unique machines he had invented. This proved to be the best business move he
could have made – he went from being indebted and near bankruptcy during the
1920s to tremendous profitability during the Great Depression. His company and his machines were
instrumental in the building of the Boulder Highway, the Hoover dam, the Orange
County Dam, and other high-profile Depression-era infrastructure projects under
the New Deal. By 1938, his company was
netting nearly a million and a half dollars in profit.
R.G.’s incredible imagination developed many of the
earth-moving machines we know of today, from the bulldozer to the rubber tire
to the electric wheel. Other inventions
included scrapers, mobile sea platforms for oil exploration and drilling in the
deep ocean, dredgers, portable cranes, bridge spans, dump trucks, and logging
equipment. Many of these machines are
unchanged in design to this day. He developed
various types of welding different types of metals in different circumstances. During the second World War, R.G.’s factories
produced 70% of all the earth-moving equipment used by the Allies during the
war. In all, he held 299 patents.
R.G. and his wife Evelyn held to the principle, as they
put it, of “It’s not how much of my money I give to God, it’s how much of God’s
money I keep for myself.” They practiced
what they called “reverse tithing” – giving 90% of their income to the work of the
Lord and keeping 10% for themselves.
R.G. and Evelyn, as well as their six children, were very active in
missions and charitable work. They set
up Christian missions in Liberia and in Peru, and used their Foundation to
funnel tens of millions of dollars to Christian missions and ministries
throughout the world. They also established
LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, still a highly-regarded Faith-based technical
school, on the site of an about-to-be-demolished Army hospital.
Sixty years after poring over that International
Correspondence School syllabus, that same school gave the 8th grade
dropout an honorary Doctorate, one of five such honors he received in his
lifetime. R.G. LeTourneau passed away in
1969. His autobiography, Mover of Men
and Mountains, is still in print.
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