Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/573

 Gasoline Horses for Small Farms

Is the Small Tractor Here at Last?

���An eighteen-horsepower tractor hauling barley over a smooth California highway

��THE amazing popularity of the small gasoline engine and the motor-car on the farm — even the motor- truck where introduced — makes it seem perfectly natural that the internal com- bustion tractor should pull the plow and take the place of the horse in all field work on the average farm. But the history of agriculture for nearly eight\' years has shown that the general appli- cation of rnechanical power to the work- ing of the soil is a problem far more difficult than the use of motors in sta- tionary work or road transportation.

The problem, however, is apparently near a solution, and the year 1916 may see the practical fulfilment of an ideal that has occupied the minds of thousands of inventors, i. e., the production of farm tractors mechanically and economically suited to the average farm, as well as to the great ranches of the West and Northwest.

Steps in the long evolution may be set down in order: 1770 — Cugnot's road loco- motive. 1800-1825 — De- velopm e n t

of steam road locomotives and their practical legislation off both American and English highways. 1858 — Fawkcs' steam plowing engine in Pennsylvania. 1870-1875 — Adoption of the differential gear and

friction clutch. 1875-1890 — Development of the steam threshing

engine, self-propelled. 1890-1905 — Development of large steam plow- ing tractors.

���A small tractor starting out from a state fair ground to give a plowing demonstration

��1903 — First commercial gas-tractor. 1910-1912 — Gas-tractors actively displacing steam for plowing on a large scale.

19 13 — Success of the power-lift plow cuts crew of plowing outfit to one man, and makes smaller tractors profitable.

19 14 — Amazing variety of small tractors produced, following virtual collapse of market for large tractors and con- stant increase in the cost of horse and man labor.

1915 — Numerous tractor demonstrations throughout the Middle West focus attention of hundreds of thousands of farmers upon light tractors pull- ing two or three plows.

1916 — Will see thousands of these small tractors, with the improvements suggested by one or two seasons' work, put to practical test by farm- ers. Partial success apparently as- sured by recent experience.

From the foregoing it will be seen that- the widely success- ful light tractor has hardly ar- rived though it may be al- most here. Changing con- dition.s — higher horse and labor costs, greater familiarity with the gas-engine on the farmer's part, a growing inclination to plow deep and farm more scientifically — these, rather than mechanical improvements, favor the light tractor of to-dav as against \er>' similar machines of five years ago. The light tractor problem is difficult. From the profit-and-loss standpoint, it costs more in proportion to build and to

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