Euclid Street

Euclid Street is named after one the largest of boys' toys, an earthmoving scraper. When the developer Mr J R Phelp formed the street in 1961, he had just taken delivery of his first huge earth scraper and wanted it immortalised in a street name.

The Euclid Company of Ohio were the premiere manufacturer of heavy earth-moving machinery founded by George Armington and his five sons. They were famed for building these machines from the drawing board up, unlike others who had tried to adapt existing trucks.

So in 1924 they introduced the Euclid Automatic Rotary Scraper, the predecessor to Mr Phelp's model. The huge need for infrastructure development in the USA in the post war era saw the company become a large corporation by 1950, selling thousands of off-road haulers and scrapers.

In 1954 they were taken over by General Motors, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary. This meant they had access to some of the best automotive engineers of the day and most importantly to transmission technology through the Allison division.

This arrangement lasted only four years when the US Government took an anti-trust suit out against GM, saying it was too dominant and hence anti-competitive. GM fought but in 1968, Euclid was sold to the White Motor Corporation. Sadly this spelt the end of Euclid as the preeminent supplier of heavy automotive machinery.

There followed many mergers and acquisitions ending in the 1990s when VME (a conglomerate of Volvo, Michigan and Euclid) entered into a joint venture with Hitachi. For a while Hitachi used Euclid as a way into the mining industry, but by 2004 the Euclid name became effectively extinct.

However there is a remnant of Euclid, some of the components used by Hitachi are cast from the Euclid originals and bear the Euclid insignia. In this industry the cost to change the castings far outweighs the benefits of branding.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.