Baldwin - Tractors : 1880s to 1980s

Yuba of Maryville, California, acquired crawler tractor makers Ball Tread of Detroit in 1912. Its half-tracks rode on partially enclosed steel balls.

T HE FARM TRACTOR evolved from steam traction and agricultural engines developed from the 1860s. These steam machines were too heavy for direct cultivation but could haul implements across fields by winch. There were notable attempts in North America to make traction engines less liable to compact the soil or bog down. The Minnis of 1869 had crawler tracks, whilst the Frye (patented in 1896) and such subsequent machines as the Hake, Olmstead, Wood, Leland, Lansing and Creuzbauer had four-wheel drive.

By the 1900s compact and comparatively lightweight 4x2 steamers existed in the USA and Europe for direct ploughing but already their future was threatened by the internal combustion engine. Agricultural steam engines lasted in production until well after the First World War, when there were some seriously competitive low-profile direct cultivation machines from Sentinel, Summerscales, Garrett and Foden in Britain and from Westinghouse, International Harvester (experimentally in the 1920s) and Baker in the USA.

However, it was the internal combustion engine that soon dominated the development of agrimotors, as early tractors were called in Britain and, in US parlance, gasoline traction engines. Instead of spending an hour or more lighting a fire and raising steam, an internal combustion engine running on highly combustible distillate liquid fuel could be put to work in minutes. Its fuel and water weighed far less than steam rivals, and it could be made smaller and lighter with benefits to both construction costs and ground damage.

The first, in 1889, was the American Charter, and several others followed, with Huber awarded credit for the first production series of thirty machines in 1898, based on an earlier Froelich-Van Duzen design. John Froelich had created the Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Co, which was reorganised in 1895 and went on to make the 1912 Waterloo Boy tractor that introduced famous plough maker John Deere into the business.

In the absence of a reliable electric ignition system these early vehicles had preheated hot tube ignition until, in 1896, British steam engineer Richard Hornsby applied one of Herbert Akroyd Stuarts compression ignition oil engines to a tractor. This worked on what one would now call the diesel principle in honour of Dr Rudolph Diesels contemporary experiments in Germany. Petter made an oil-engined tractor in Somerset at around the same time, but hardly any market existed for such advanced ideas. Herbert Percy Saunderson began experiments with petrol engines that culminated in front-wheel drive power units for carts and implements in 1904. Eighteen months earlier his Bedfordshire rival Dan Albone came up with a compact three-wheeler known as the Ivel, which was a practical replacement for the heavy draught horse. In 1908 Saunderson countered with a three-wheeler design by which all its wheels were driven, predating the John Deere Dain and Glasgow by some ten years. Deutz in Germany made a very similar machine to the Ivel in 1907, but with four wheels, and a year later came up with a remarkable 40 hp four-wheel drive machine with mounted ploughs at either end. These could be raised and lowered by an on-board power winch with one set of four ploughshares at work to the headland, where the machine simply set off in the opposite direction with the other plough in use. This idea soon found favour in France with Amiot, Auror, Delahaye and others. A French first in 1906 was the Gougis, with a universally jointed shaft transmitting power to implements such as the reaper-binder.

A way of making the steam traction engine more mobile was patented in 1887 by William Leland of Oroville, California. It featured 4x4 and centre pivot steering.

An unusually small steam traction engine working directly on the land in 1905 and more unusual still in having mounted ploughs for two-way working. It was made by Wallis & Steevens of Basingstoke, Hampshire.

William Paterson built this internal combustion engine machine for steam traction engine and threshing machine maker J. I. Case in 1892, but Case did not return to gasoline until 1911.

H. P. Saundersons neat agrimotor could be attached to various carts and implements. Here one hauls rocks for a fruit and poultry farmer near Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire in 1904.

The compact Ivel was first seen in 1903 and changed little in appearance in fifteen years except that the mechanism became enclosed. This demonstration was on the Beaulieu Estate in Hampshire with its owner, Lord Montagu, on the extreme right.

Motor ploughs were popular on the Continent, this being a 40 hp Praga. Also from Austria-Hungary came the rival Excelsior which, like the Praga, was widely exported, and there were also several German manufacturers.

Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire henceforth took greater interest in large motorised ploughs with two drive wheels and a jockey wheel at the rear of the plough frame for steering. In Britain former steam traction engine makers Fowler of Leeds became enamoured with similar ideas, but they proved to be a dead end as the machines were really only useful for a sole purpose in an age when tractors were becoming more universally adaptable machines.

One of IHCs famous Moguls was the 15-30 (re-rated 25 hp) of 191315, during which period over five hundred were sold. Exhaust valves were cooled using liquid from the waterfall type, pump-fed cooling tower. Driver visibility must have been minimal.

North American tractors (a name coined by Hart Parr in 1907, followed by farm tractor in 1912) tended to be as big as their steam contemporaries. They could break the prairie, but they were only practical for large spaces and wealthy owners, and they were built mostly by the traditional implement and traction engine firms. North America was by far the largest user of tractors, yet annual production in 1909 had reached only about two thousand. In 1913 the figure was 7,450 (in that same year Ford alone made 202,667 cars and light commercials). One of the most significant manufacturers of every sort of farm machine was the International Harvester Co (IHC), created in 1902 from a number of competing businesses, of which the most important had been created by Cyrus Hall McCormick and William Deering. A few thousand prairie monsters with such names as Mogul and Titan followed, but IHC realised that the vast majority of farmers neither could afford nor required such machines. They were not the first to make smaller tractors in America, but their 1914 single-cylinder 8-16 hp Mogul was one of the industrys first big sellers, with 14,065 built by 1917 plus a further 8,900 of a larger 10-20 model made in 191619. Incidentally, most tractors were given a two-figure horsepower rating, the smaller one being the power measured at the drawbar and the higher its output at optimum revolutions on the belt pulley. In 1915 IHC came up with the 10-20 twin-cylinder Titan and sold 78,000 in seven years alongside a more modern-looking four-cylinder Junior, which accounted for some 33,000 tractors.