More than 100,000 in print Despite early failures, R. G. LeTourneau rose to eminence in the competitive world of manufacturing and construction. Although his competitors thought him insane, history has proved that his inventive genius was decades ahead of its time. His combination of enterprise and Christian commitment led to his sponsoring many works involving missions and education, including LeTourneau College, a Christian liberal arts and technical school in Longview, Texas. Through a lifetime of business ventures, this engineering genius put faith into action and reaped big rewards. Movers of Men and Mountains is the story of how an engineering genius put faith into action and reaped big rewards. ROBERT GILMORE LETOURNEAU (1888-1969) rose to eminence in the competitive world of manufacturing and construction. Although his competitors thought him insane, history has proved that his inventive genius was decades ahead of its time. Mr. LeTourneau is known as the man who gave 90 percent of his income to Christian causes around the world. His combination of enterprise and Christian commitment led to his sponsoring many works involving missions and education, including LeTourneau College, a Christian liberal arts and technical school in Longview, Texas. Mr. LeTourneau is author of Mover of Men and Mountains. Mover of Men and Mountains The Autobiography of R.G. LeTourneau By R.G. LeTourneau Moody Publishers Copyright © 1967 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8024-3818-8 CHAPTER 1 For 25 years or more, I've been traveling this land of ours and a few foreign countries trying to teach and preach by word of mouth and example, that a Christian businessman owes as much to God as a preacher does. The rest of the time I build machinery, almost any kind of machinery as long as it is big, and powerful, and can move around to do things no other machine could do before. Some people think I'm all mixed up—that you can't serve the Lord and business, too, but that's just the point. God needs businessmen as partners as well as preachers. When He created the world and everything in it, He didn't mean for us to stop there and say, "God, You've done it all. There's nothing left for us to build." He wanted us to take off from there and really build for His greater glory. I speak in churches and auditoriums large and small across the land, usually about six times a week, and most often I start out by saying, "I am just a mechanic whom the Lord has blessed." I'll let that serve as a starter here. As a mechanic, I like my machinery because I learned early that man is worth what man produces, and good machines help him produce more. Had I been born 100 years earlier, I would have been a good blacksmith, as men like me had been since the Bronze Age. But the Lord chose to put me here when electric motors and gasoline engines were just starting to turn, and with His blessings I have been able to take part in and contribute to the development of those great, heavy-construction machines that have helped produce our twentieth century. Recently I built an eight-wheeled digger that out-produces the work of thousands of men at the time I was born. Instead of pushing a 100-pound wheelbarrow, the operator pushes a button and picks up the loads of 1,500 wheelbarrows, rolling off with them at 15 mph instead of two. Its rubber-tired wheels are eight feet high by over three feet wide, and inside the hub of each wheel is an electric motor that delivers more power than the giant steam engines of my youth. When it dips its twin buckets into the ground, it scoops up 150 tons of dirt in two minutes, and then lopes off to dump its load at the push of another button. Distance for distance it moves for eight cents a cubic yard what cost a dollar when I started out in business, and dollars were about three times their present size then. I find a great deal of satisfaction in watching that brute in action, and more in the challenge of finding some better way of getting it to move 200 tons even more efficiently. In my talks, along with the statement that I am just a mechanic whom the Lord has blessed, I frequently add that He uses the weak to confound the mighty. There is no logical explanation in the world to account for my development of that digger. It combines two huge mobile Diesel engines with AC generators and DC generators, and it pours enough electricity to light a small town into a score of AC and DC motors. Yet I never got past the seventh grade in school. At the age of 30 my garage had failed and I was $5,000 in debt. At the age of 44 I lost so heavily on contracts that my employees, with more faith in me than I had in myself, took up a collection to get me back on my feet. That was me, working on my own. If there is no logical explanation of my development of the digger, there is a theological one, available to all of us, including the weakest. By accepting God as your partner, no limit can be placed on what