Farm Tractors. Michael Williams
of Britain’s farmers were ready for tractor power in the early years of the twentieth century. The big acreage farms and estates were equipped with steam engines and the rest relied on horsepower, and British tractor makers were forced to find overseas markets for most of their sales. By 1906, Ivel tractors had been sold in 18 countries from Canada to Australia and from Nigeria to Cuba, and the successes included an order for 18 tractors for the Philippines.
The Ivel was described as “undoubtedly the great attraction” at the 1904 Paris Show. Furthermore, a Canadian farmer was quoted as describing it as “the new farmer’s friend,” and a feature about tractor development in America and Britain in a leading publication in Argentina said the Ivel was “the most successful agricultural motor yet placed on the market.” After a Ministry of Agriculture demonstration in Italy, the organizers were so impressed by the Ivel that they gave Albone a special medal to commemorate the event.
As well as developing export markets, Albone showed extraordinary imagination in seeking new opportunities to sell his tractors in Britain. He kept an Ivel tractor and a range of machinery on land near the factory where demonstrations of farming by tractor power were held once every fortnight. One of his tractors, complete with crew dressed in firemen’s uniforms, was demonstrated as a fire engine, using the belt pulley to power the pump. He also turned an Ivel tractor into a military ambulance, with steel cladding to protect the driver and two rear doors made of steel plate opening outwards to provide some protection for stretcher bearers walking behind the tractor. Real bullets were fired at the tractor to test the armor plating during a demonstration for the army, and Dan Albone showed how the pulley could be used to power ice-making plant or equipment for purifying water for a field hospital. He also demonstrated the tractor’s ability to haul medical supplies over rough ground—despite this, the military chiefs decided they still preferred horses.
Albone died in 1906 at the age of 46, long before either he or his tractors had reached their full potential. After his death, development work on the tractors slowed, and, without his energy and imagination, the company lost its momentum. Instead of being a leader in design and marketing, the Ivel company made an unsuccessful attempt to import a Hart-Parr tractor before ceasing to trade in about 1915.
Growing Influence in Europe
Although the United States and Britain dominated the early stages of tractor development, there was some activity elsewhere in Europe. Nicholas Cugnot, a French farmer’s son, is credited with building the first self-propelled vehicle, using steam power, almost 250 years ago, while Otto built the first successful internal combustion engine in Germany. The French and the Germans used their early leadership, however, to develop motor cars instead of tractors.
The Ivel established the idea of lightweight, versatile tractors suitable for smaller acreages commercially. The large tank beside the driver’s seat holds cooling water for the engine and also provides additional weight over the driving wheels to encourage better traction.
A tractor designed and built by a Frenchman called Gougis in about 1907 included a power take-off shaft to power-trailed machines. Gougis successfully demonstrated the drive shaft with a binder, but it seems that he did not attempt to develop his idea commercially. This was just three years after Professor Scott had shown his PTO–driven, front-mounted binder in England, and the idea did not become widely available until the early 1920s.
German interest was concentrated initially on using electricity to power field work such as plowing, but one exception to this was the plowing tractor Pfluglokomotive designed by Deutz, a company as old as the four-stroke engine. Deutz built two different plowing tractors in 1907, and one of these appears to have been the first two-way or bi-directional tractor.
The Pfluglokomotive featured an upright steering wheel and control levers at the center of the tractor, with a seat on each side allowing the driver to face either forward or to the rear while operating the controls. There were four-furrow plows mounted at the front and the rear of the tractor, each with its own cable-operated lift system operated by hand levers. The tractor unit was driven back and forth across the field by using each of the plows and also changing seats alternately. Although the tractor was built by Deutz and was powered by a 40 HP Deutz engine, the two-way plowing equipment was called the System Brey after its inventor.
Although the Deutz tractor and plowing system showed considerable ingenuity, it failed to develop commercially. The Deutz company later became known as Deutz-Fahr, for many years Germany’s biggest tractor and machinery manufacturer. It was later taken over by the Italian-based Same tractor company, now called Same Deutz-Fahr.
A Lasting Future
While the steam engine started the power farming revolution, it was the tractor power pioneered in the United States and Europe that achieved a lasting impact on the structure and economics of food production. The scale of this achievement is indicated by the decline in the number of animals working on farms. Census figures for the United States show the number of horses and mules on farms peaked at 26 million in 1920, when the number of tractors was almost 250,000. From 1920 onward, the census figures for working animals were lower each year, reaching fewer than 7.8 million in 1950, while tractor numbers had moved steadily upward to 3.6 million in the same year.
There were similar trends in Canada. The cultivated area in the prairie provinces had reached 17.4 million hectares (43 million acres) in 1921, the number of working horses had reached 2.24 million—an all-time high—and there were exactly 38,465 tractors. Thirty years later, the cropped area was more than 27.1 million hectares (67 million acres), the working horse population was 696,000 and farmers used the power provided by a fleet of 237,000 tractors.
Tractor power achieved similar results on British farms, reducing the number of working horses from their 1,137,000 peak in 1910 to just a few hundred by the late 1990s, when they were mainly used in small numbers for forestry work.
Contents
Start of the Power Farming Revolution
Designed for Performance
Special Tractors for Special Jobs
Postwar Expansion
Shaping the Modern Tractor
The Future of Power Farming
Photos
About the Author
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