How Just One Breakthrough Saved American Trucking

If you have ever taken a loaded truck down a long mountain grade, you already know one of the worst feelings ever. The pedal stops working, the drums are smoking, and the truck is still picking up speed. For three decades, this was the most dangerous moment in American long-haul trucking. Brake fade killed drivers on Cajon Pass, on Donner Summit, on the long descents of Interstate Seventy through the Rockies. Highway engineers carved runaway truck ramps into the hillsides because the industry had no mechanical answer to it. Until one man, who in nineteen thirty-one had nearly become one of those deaths himself on a California mountain road at dusk, decided to build one. This is the story of how the Jake brake saved American trucking. A blind date that nearly didn't happen. A company that said no three times. And a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar reckoning, sixty years too late.