Power m the Present invented and produced for farmers. The Development Cyrus McCormick invented his reaper in 1831. It soon created a demand for belt power with which to of the Tractor thresh the mechanically harvested grain crops. By i860 more than 50 E. M. Dieffenbach and R. B. Gray shops from Maine to California were building threshers under license from the Pitts Brothers, American inventors who patented a thresher in 1837. A FARMER in 1910 needed 135 hours to Steel plows, mowers, shellers, fodder produce 100 bushels of corn, 106 hours cutters, and other machines were of- for 100 bushels of wheat, and 276 for fered to the farmer soon thereafter. a bale of cotton. The reaper and the thresher made The average for the United States obsolete the flail, which had been in in i960 was about 23 man-hours to common use for centuries in all parts produce 100 bushels of corn, 17 for 100 of the world for beating out the grain bushels of wheat, and 77 for a bale of from the heads. First it was a whip, cotton. sometimes with two or more lashes. A reason for this big drop in the The later versions consisted of a wood American farmer's labor requirement handle with a shorter stick hung at was the development of the tractor. the end so as to swing freely. Tractors were perfected because of Work animals also became obsolete, the need for mechanical power for in a manner of speaking, in time. Used the new machines that were being with sweeps and treadmills, they pro- 25 26 YEARBOOK OF AGRICULTURE 1960 vided some power, but not enough for and cheaper, or more rapidly, so as to operating the threshers and other belt- get through more perfectly in season; driven machines. Manufacturers of or in some way afford an advantage threshers and other machines under- over plowing with animals, else it is no took therefore the production of mov- success." able steam engines. Philander Standish built the Stan- The early steam engines furnished dish steam rotary plow, the Mayflower, belt power, but they had to be pulled at Pacheco, Calif., in 1868. It was from place to place by horses or oxen. offered for sale in several sizes, ranging One of the first to be produced in the from 10 to 60 horsepower. Operating United States was the Forty-Niner, It speed was i .7 to 3.4 miles an hour, and was built in Philadelphia in 1849 by the plowing rate was up to 5 acres an A. L. Archambault in 4-, 10-, and 30- hour. horsepower sizes. The smallest of these Also in 1868 Owen Redmond of weighed 2 tons, or a thousand pounds Rochester, N.Y,, patented a steam per horsepower. plow. A report of the Commissioner of The Baker and Hamilton Co. mar- Agriculture in 1870 announced that "a keted a movable threshing engine in gang of six plows, designed to go with 1880. The boiler had a jacket of 2-inch the engine, has since been constructed, staves, held in place by brass bands, intended to be operated by one man, and could burn wood, coal, or straw. who also might be the fireman." It had an Ames engine and Laufen- While the main efforts in providing burg boiler and was built by the Ames self-propulsion systems for steam trac- Iron Works of Oswego, N.Y. Henry tors seemed to center largely around Ames was one of the early builders and the use of wheel propulsion, many in- advocates of steampower on the farm, ventors were at work devising methods and he founded a factory to make for providing better traction through movable engines in 1854. the application of tracks and other de- The next step in the evolution of vices. They worked out many unusual farm power was the conversion of the ideas. portable steam engine into a self-pro- Gideon Morgan of Calhoun, Tenn., pelled steam traction engine. received a patent for a wheel substitute The first ones were developed pri- in 1850. The language of his patent marily for plowing. O bed Hussey of was for an improvement in track-type Baltimore invented and put into oper- tractor design; the development of the ation a ''steam plow" in 1855. J. S. crawder-type tractor in the United Fawkes of Christiana, Pa., produced States therefore must have begun be- a more successful steam plowing outfit fore 1850. in 1858. Its frame was of iron, 8 feet R. J. Nunn of Savannah, Ga., pat- wide and 12 feet long, and rested on ented an "improvement in land con- the axle of a roller (driver) 6 feet in veyance" in 1867. It was essentially diameter and 6 feet wide. two or more bands running over a President Abraham Lincoln, in an series of grooved rollers that were address before the Wisconsin State mounted in a frame and driven Agricultural Society at Milwaukee, in through a larger roller powered by a 1859, said: steam engine. "The successful application of steam- Thomas S. Minnisof Meadville, Pa., power to farm work is a desideratum— in 1867 patented a locomotive for especially a steam plow. It is not plowing and in 1870 a steam tractor enough that a machine operated by mounted on three tracks—two in the steam will really plow. To be success- rear and one in front. Each rear track ful, it must, all things considered, plow was driven by a steam engine, at- better than can be done by animal tached at the rear, through pinion and power. It must do all the work as well. drive gear. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRACTOR 27 According to Hal Higgins, an au- the driving wheels wider and wider. thority on power farming, "Iowa's first Daniel Best sold his first steamer, a 'dirt farming tractor' was this Minnis three-wheeler with vertical boiler, in Crawler from Pennsylvania that came 1889. One big-wheel outfit which was out to the raw prairie within sight of made by the Best Manufacturing Co. the new Iowa State Agricultural Col- in 1900 for the Middle River Farming lege as the first students started attend- Co., Stockton, Calif., had two wood- ing classes within sight of its smoke." covered drive wheels 15 feet wide and Robert C. Parvin of Illinois in 1873 9 feet in diameter. The outfit weighed built a steam tractor propelled by an 41 tons. endless chain of steel plates to w^hich The Stockton Wheel Co. (later the ''feet," shod with 2-inch plank, were Holt Manufacturing Co.) built its attached. It pulled six plows. first steam traction engine (of a track Charles H. Stratton, Moscow, Pa., type) in 1890. Topography, soil, and in 1893 produced a steam-powered their large acreages led farmers on traction engine designed especially "to the Pacific Coast to accept this type travel readily over plowed ground, for of tractor more readily than farmers cross plowing, and other work." The in other sections. front end was supported by wheels on Benjamin Holt successfully demon- a pivoted axle and the rear by a pair of strated his first track-type tractor near compactly arranged tracks actuated Stockton in 1904 after considerable through gears and pinions from the experimentation, in which he devised horizontal engine. Besides driving the a pair of rough wooden tracks that he tracks, the engine could be used to installed on a steam engine from which drive a shaft that could be used to the wheels had been removed. drive threshers or other machines—a He made use of three clutches—the so-called power takeoff*. master clutch, for connecting the pow- One of the first attempts to manu- er source, and the track clutches. When facture track-type tractors commer- the track clutch was released on one cially was made by Al vin O. Lombard side, the power applied through the of Waterville, Me., in the early 1890's. track clutch on the other side caused He patented one of the first practical the tractor to pivot around the de- track-type tractors in 1901. Lombard clutched track. Application of brakes adopted the ball tread idea of John on the declutched side increased the B. Linn of Cleveland. speed of turning. This method of trans- Lombard substituted rollers for the mission continues to be used by the balls. He built a workable tractor Caterpillar Tractor Co. and has been and sold a number of machines. The adopted by most other manufacturers unit was "designed specially for trans- of tracklaying tractors. porting lumber and logs over the Only eight of the track-type Holt rough roads and even cross country steamers were built. He had already in the Maine woods," It embodied made experiments to replace steam- half-track construction. The front was power by gasoline, and one model supported by runners in winter and tractor of the track type, which burned wheels in the summer. Two power- gasoline, was produced in 1907. driven tracks were in the rear. Inventors between 1870 and 1880 Another track tractor was the Cen- devised a suitable gearing for the rear tiped Log Hauler manufactured by wheels of portable steam engines of the Phoenix Manufacturing Co., Eau the w^heel type and also a chain or Claire, Wis. It resembled the Lombard belt drive from the engine flywheel to machine, 'but it used a vertical instead a countershaft of this gearing to pro- of horizontal engine. vide self-propulsion. Other early inventors tried to solve The bevel gear and inclined shaft- the problems of traction by making developed by C.