Before Henry Ford's Fordson, farm tractors were heavy steam giants that sank in English mud
The first tractors were steam engines worked in pairs at opposite edges of a field, winching a plough back and forth on a wire cable. Direct-ploughing steam machines struggled in heavy, wet English soil, where horses were cheaper. It took light petrol tractors, and one cheap mass-produced model, to transform farming.
A tractor is built to deliver strong pulling force at low speed, whether to haul trailers or to drive machinery in farming, mining or construction. The word comes from the Latin agent noun of trahere, to pull, and was first recorded in its vehicle sense in 1896, growing out of traction motor from 1859. In Britain and much of Europe it simply means a farm tractor, while North Americans also use it for the cab unit of an articulated lorry.
Early 19th-century farms used portable steam engines that drove machinery through a belt. Richard Trevithick designed a barn engine for threshing corn in 1812, William Tuxford of Boston, Lincolnshire, made a truly portable engine in 1839, and in 1859 Thomas Aveling fitted a chain to a horse-hauled portable engine so it could move itself, creating the traction engine. Its standard form, settled by the late 1860s, barely changed for sixty years.
Petrol arrived in 1889, when John Charter in Illinois put Otto engines on a steam chassis. John Froelich built his own in Iowa in 1892 and lost everything by 1895. Britain's first oil-engined tractor, from Richard Hornsby & Sons, was sold in 1897, and Dan Albone's three-wheeled Ivel Agricultural Motor of 1901, priced at £300 in 1903, sold about 500 units. In Iowa, Charles Hart and Charles Parr built 15 tractors in 1903; their 14,000-pound third machine, now in the Smithsonian, is the oldest surviving American example.
Henry Ford's frameless Fordson of 1917, held together by its own engine block, took 77 percent of the American market by 1923. Harry Ferguson patented his three-point hitch in 1926, the only statically determinate way to join two bodies, and partnered with Ford in 1938. America had 500 petrol tractors in 1910 and nearly a million by 1935, when Germany had 15,000. General Electric sold the first commercial electric garden tractor, the Elec-Trak, from 1969 to 1975.
Source: Tractor
