He was always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a pre-set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project completed 35 years later, five years after his death.

Bechtel got on the map in a place that was almost off it--Black Canyon, Nev. With Depression raging in 1931, Bechtel helped organize a consortium called Six Companies to tackle what was then the biggest civil engineering construction job in U.S. history: the Hoover Dam. Workers had to excavate 3.7 million cubic yards of rock and pour 4.4 million cubic yards of cement; the main arch of the dam towers 70 stories high. Steve was first in charge of all transportation, engineering and administration. When his father died suddenly in 1933, he became chief executive of the whole project, which transformed the economy of much of the West, as well as transforming the company.

After Hoover, Bechtel was convinced he and his outfit had no limits, and set out to prove it. While the dam was still going up, he began building the 8.2-mile San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge. During World War II, Bechtel operated shipyards that turned out more than 550 cargo carriers and oil tankers. At the same time he built a top-secret 1,600-mile pipeline through the Canadian wilderness to Alaska, under primitive conditions. The hectic pace left him so fatigued that in 1946 he briefly retired. But he could never be happy on the shelf.