The machine that retired the horse. Gasoline tractors practical for ordinary farms arrived in the 1910s, and Ford's mass-produced Fordson made the price a family farm could pay; within two generations the working horse was gone from rich-country fields, along with the quarter of farmland once needed to feed it. The engine's engineering belongs to the Technology Atlas; the tractor as the pivot of farm mechanization belongs here. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Introduced Year OriginSteam traction engines from the mid 1800s; gasoline tractors from the 1890s; the mass-produced Fordson of 1917 marks the start of general farm mechanization 1 Connections
Associated With
the steam traction engine is the direct mechanical predecessor of the gasoline and diesel farm tractor
Developed By
Why this is disputed. Holt patented and manufactured the first practical crawler-type tracked tractor; the tractor as a whole category has multiple credited pioneers (Froelich, Hart-Parr among them), so this is one attested contribution, not sole-inventor credit
Sources
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