The average person likely doesn’t think about tractors much, and most have never paused to watch one work. That’s a shame, as tractors are among the most fascinating engine-powered machines, without which agriculture would be profoundly different. In 1892, the tractor’s transformation of farming took a big stride forward when inventor John Froelich used a gasoline engine to create the common ancestor of the beloved tool that’s so critical to farming today.
According to the U.S. government, there were over four million tractors in operation in America in 2022. A paper published for the Agricultural Safety and Health Council of America in 2010 suggested that the average age of a tractor in America is over 25 years old, or a little more than twice as old as the average automobile. That same paper notes that many farmers prefer older tractors, and history is full of iconic designs.
Tractors come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The smallest tractors are smaller than a compact car, and the largest tractor in the world would make the Canyonero from The Simpsons look as small as a Smart Fortwo. Some of the brands we know and love today either have their roots in tractors or had a massive tractor business, including Ford, Fiat, Lamborghini, and Porsche. Even Citroën made tractors!
All of these wonderful machines and the hard work that they do have a common ancestor that looks nothing like them. The tractors of today owe their existence to the invention built by John Froelich over a century ago.
Advancing Agriculture
Farm implements have evolved dramatically throughout human history. As agriculture publication Farm Equipment writes, some of the earliest known plows were forked sticks that Sumerian farmers dragged in the dirt in 5500 BC. Egyptians around 5200 BC used scythes made from stone!
Even with those inventions, farming was hard, extremely labor-intensive work for centuries. In 1830, Farm Equipment writes, farmers spent anywhere between 250 hours to 300 hours to produce just five acres of wheat using the tools of the day like a walking plow, a harrow (breaks up and smooths soil after ploughing), a hand broadcast of seed, and a sickle and flail for harvesting.
The 1700s and 1800s saw incredible inventions that allowed for farming to become a little easier, from Eli Whitney’s cotton gin to Cyrus Hall McCormick’s mechanical reaper (an implement that cuts grain). Vehicles would eventually become part of farming, with the mechanical reaper evolving to be towed by horses. The early combine harvester of the 1830s was also pulled by horses or oxen.
Then the steam age arrived. Initially, steam-powered farm machinery consisted of portable engines pulled by horses. Then came an invention poised to replace the horse. According to Farm Collector, it is believed that one of the earliest steam-powered tractors built in America was constructed by Henry G. Stone in 1860. His steam-powered traction engine – the term tractor didn’t exist yet – was noted to be impractical and not a replacement for horses, but it did start and run.
Steam power was also a huge deal in Great Britain, where inventors over there had also experimented with self-propelled steam-powered farming implements. Unfortunately, so many of those experiments failed due to the different soil conditions out there.
As educational resource ThoughtCo writes, various steam-powered tractors went into use in the 1860s. If you look at a steam tractor for long enough, you might notice that it looks a heck of a lot like a steam locomotive, but one that didn’t ride on rails. Many steam tractor designs were similar to steam locomotives. These tractors handled hard work on the farm, but were also used to haul heavy loads on the road. If you had some heavy timber to haul in those days, a steam “road locomotive” might have picked it up.
If you have spare time, I highly recommend watching steam tractor content on YouTube. These beautiful behemoths are so fascinating to watch, and you can sink hours into seeing them crawl across fields. I apologize ahead of time.
That brings us to one of the biggest developments in farming, and it’s the gasoline tractor.
Fixing The Problems With Steam
John Froelich was born in 1849 in Iowa and grew up in the town of Froelich, which was named after his father. According to the State Historical Society of Iowa, Froelich had spent much of his early years involved in farming, but he also tinkered with engines, even reportedly fitting a gasoline engine to a well driller.
Progressive Farmer, which got access to the archives of the Froelich Tractor & 1890s Village Museum, says that this is how the first gas-powered tractor came to be:
John Froelich operated a custom harvesting business in the late 1800s. The 45,000-pound steam engine he used to power his thresher was hard to transport, often got stuck and was a fire hazard in dry fields in Iowa and South Dakota. Finding enough wood or coal to power the machine was a chore.
The inventive businessman decided a lighter gasoline engine — like the ones that powered his grain elevator and mill and well driller — could solve problems associated with steam-powered tractors. Gasoline, a byproduct of making kerosene, was cheap and plentiful at the time.
Gasoline engines had been finding their way into farming by that time, replacing steam engines in some equipment applications. These engines showed lots of promise. They were lighter than steam engines and were much safer. Gasoline engines didn’t threaten to burn down entire farms and didn’t have giant boilers to explode if things went really wrong.
According to Progressive Farmer, Froelich purchased a Van Duzen 14 HP single-cylinder gasoline engine, and in early 1892, he got to work with his assistant and blacksmith, William Mann. Together, the men mounted the engine onto a wood frame and connected the engine to the running gear of a steam engine. Progressive Farmer notes that Froelich and Mann used many existing steam engine parts, but had to make parts unique to a gas engine application, including a water-cooling system, steering, and a clutch for directional control.
Reportedly, a crowd watched as Froelich used a rifle cartridge and a hammer to wake the gasoline engine. Then, his gas-powered traction engine roared into the history books, as Progressive Farmer writes:
After a local threshing demonstration used the new tractor, Froelich shipped the machine that was nearly 17 tons lighter than a large steam engine to South Dakota in September of 1892. It provided power to thresh about 72,000 bushels of grain.
The early success prompted Froelich and a group of investors to form the Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company in 1893 for $50,000 to make more gas tractors. Froelich, the president of the company, promised to make 50 tractors (according to the History Channel) in the first year but could only manage four. Only two were sold and both were returned due to starting and mechanical problems. Efforts to build a practical tractor failed.
The company reorganized in 1895, now called the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company. Froelich left the business because it focused on stationary gas engines, not tractors. The company, though, continued to work on tractors and improve Froelich’s design. It created the Waterloo Boy model R in 1914 and then the model N, which were both retail successes.
Now, if you’re confused by the use of “traction engine” here, it’s because the term “tractor” wasn’t popularized until about the early 1900s. But make no mistake here, what Froelich and Mann built is very much the ancestor to today’s mighty tractors.
How Froelich’s Tractor Worked
Progressive Farmer didn’t really explain how Froelich’s tractor worked, and that’s a shame because running the tractor involved a fascinating process. According to the book, The John Deere Legacy by Don Macmillan Wayne G. Broehl, the Van Duzen engine didn’t use a spark plug. Instead, it was of a hot tube design.
Hot tube engines are fascinating because they use a separate heat source to ignite the air-fuel mixture in the combustion chamber. How it worked was actually really simple. A closed tube with thin walls was heated using an external flame. The tube was mounted 90 degrees to the engine head and surrounded by an asbestos chimney to retain heat. A burner heated the tube to about orange-hot, enough heat for the tube to ignite the fuel in the engine. Curiously, this meant that these engines required two fuel sources: One for the engine and another for the heat tube’s burner.
As The John Deere Legacy notes, the hot tubes for the Van Duzen engine were made out of plain water pipe. These pipes sometimes burst violently, which led to the engine shutting down until another water pipe could be sourced and heated up. The other oddity with heat pipes was that their burners needed to stay lit even after the engine was started. The operator would reduce fuel flow to the burner after the engine started, but not let it go out. If you let the hot tube cool down too much, there wouldn’t be enough heat to permit fuel ignition.
These engines weren’t carbureted and instead used rudimentary adjustable fuel pumps to inject something close to the correct air-fuel mixture. Engine cooling was also extremely basic; water was poured into an open basin, where an engine-driven pump flowed the water around the engine’s cooling jacket. Reportedly, it was common for engines like these to use a barrel of water a day or more due to how lossy this form of cooling was.
The John Deere Legacy also notes that the starting process of this engine was pretty ridiculous. In the morning, the hot tube’s burner would be fired up, and the crew worked on lubing and prepping the thresher and the rest of the tractor while the tube heated up. Once the hot tube was believed to be hot enough to permit combustion, enough gasoline for one firing was poured into the engine through the open oil cup in the head.
Then, several men pulled on the engine’s large flywheels. The idea here was to draw fuel into the hot tube at just the right time, right before the piston reached top dead center. If done correctly, the single fuel charge would fire, and the engine would gain enough momentum to pull in another charge of fuel by itself and fire that one off, resulting in the engine finally starting and running. If the timing was off, the starting process had to be started again. Here’s another cool video showing a hot tube engine:
Then, once you get the engine started as The John Deere Legacy notes, you still have to connect your farming implement to the engine. In this case, a belt connects the engine to a thresher. How does this work? A manual clutch is used to deliver power from the engine to the thresher. The book says this took a somewhat delicate operation involving a sliding collar. Transfer too little power, and the thresher might not run. Try to throw in too much power, and you might stall the engine, which means starting the whole starting process all over again.
Thus, using a gasoline engine didn’t mean that the farmer could use their tractor all by themselves, at least, not at first. However, many believed it to be a better idea than using steam. Other farmers continued to use steam for decades as the gasoline engine evolved from what I described above to the more reliable and easy to use powerplants that we know of today.
It Only Gets Wilder From Here
Tractor history becomes extremely exciting past this point. Henry Ford developed the first mass-produced lightweight tractor, the Fordson, which grew to be so insanely popular that it became the best-selling tractor in America. Meanwhile, in 1918, Deere and Company (John Deere) purchased the Waterloo Company, and over time, the name John Deere has become the first spoken by many in tractors. The company’s green and yellow livery is recognizable even to people who don’t follow tractors.
As for Froelich, he lost everything in 1895 when Waterloo originally failed. He then left the company and moved to Dubuque, and then later to Minnesota. Froelich would find riches once again with the invention of the Froelich Neostyle Washer, a clothes washing machine. Despite that, Froelich is still known best for his tractor.
The next time you drive by a tractor doing its thing, I recommend hitting the brakes and taking a few minutes to watch it in action. Like me, you might find yourself fascinated by the beautiful motions of a machine that came to be after over a century of development. Who knows where we would be today had the inventors of the 1800s chosen different paths rather than trying to improve farming?
More tractor fun inbound!
If you have interest and have not already gone, I suggest taking that river road up to Burlington Iowa and then head west to the Old Threshers reunion. the Steam Behemoths in motion are a sight to see for sure. https://www.oldthreshers.org/
This is some great stuff! I grew up around old tractors and The Old Man basically worked his entire life over at the John Deere plant in Waterloo. They actually threw him a party of sorts when he retired and gave our family a private tour of the assembly plant. It’s quite a place to say the least.
My favorite classic tractor still has to be the 1938 Minneapolis Moline UDLX Comfortractor. Designed to drive into town after plowing the field, it could do 40 mph in road-mode, but unfortunately wasn’t a sales success as it had a variety of issues and was quite expensive at the time. Only 150 were built with 50 of those returned to the factory to be converted back to a regular tractor. I’ve seen a couple of them in person – very cool pieces of ag history.
Over the past few years, I’ve been helping a cousin with bringing in the hay from his fields. First time driving tractors and we’ve had the mowing deck attached, the big hay baler, and of course the spike to lift the bales.
Everything about those machines are designed to kill you if you don’t pay attention. You have the rapidly rotating knives of death. 1000lb bales of hay that want to roll down hill. 4′ long steel spike on the front of the tractor. The PTO shaft spinning at 750 rpm. All of which are waiting for you to let your guard down.
On the plus side, I get to spend days playing on big machines, that someone else bought and is buying all of the diesel. Worth the risk.
My father graduated college (with a doctorate in mathematics) during the great depression. He could not find any work with his degree, so he and a friend spent the next two years driving a model T around the country, working as steam tractor and steam thresher operators and mechanics.
When I was little he would take me to these steam tractor shows, where I would stare in wonder and fear at these loud, steam belching, monstrously giant machines. You could feel the sheer power of them next to you, and they always seemed covered in endless hot tubes and strange homemade looking belts. None of them had even basic belt guards or other safety precautions. I still don’t fully understand how you could operate one without losing a limb!
I highly recommend everyone attend a steam tractor show at least once.
One big advantage of ICE tractors (and all uses of engines) over steam is that, as ridiculous as that starting procedure is, it still wasn’t an hours-long process of building a fire and waiting while hundreds of gallons of water heated up. They also didn’t require the painful process of regularly descaling boiler tubes.
It’s worth noting that one of the most popular tractors in history (the Lanz Bulldog, 220k units sold over 40+ years in the mid 20th century) was also a hotbulb engine. These tractors were so simple that many only had one gauge for the driver: A rotating arrow to let him know which direction the engine had decided to spin. You could even run them at ‘zero’ RPM, bouncing the engine and the whole tractor back and forth, with the direction reversing whenever the single cylinder reached TDC.
I’m a farm kid who grew up in the 90’s, but primarily used tractors from the 30’s-60’s. I love those simple old machines, but you do learn a couple things from using them:
1. Broken/working is not binary. There are whole grades of functionality between starting right up and completely useless. 2. If you want to have a tractor always on hand to make hay while the sun shines, you usually need a spare for when the first one decides to take the day off.
I could only imagine the ground pressure of a steam tractor and how easily it might get stuck in a field.
But, yes, an old Massey (be it Massey Ferguson or Massey Harris depending on vintage) is still a common sight. I blame Conrad Black here for selling it and it not being the same.
The shear width of the wheels on steam tractors helped. With extensions, they could be 6+ feet wide to decrease pressure. You’re right, though, that (especially in the early years and especially in the UK), steam tractors often didn’t actually traverse the fields that they were plowing. Instead, they would run along the edge with a large winch mounted below the boiler. This winch would extend to either another tractor or a heavily-weighted cart on the other side of the field and be used to pull a plow back and forth between them without the risk of bogging down the tractors.
https://steamploughclub.org.uk/steam-ploughing-a-simple-guide/
My first engineering job was with John Deere Killefer Works in Los Angeles, 1967. Before starting my job, I was sent to Moline for 10 weeks training. Although old, this factory was very efficient and well managed. Coworkers were predominantly WWII veterans and 30+ years of service. My experience and knowledge grew exponentially and every day was new opportunities. The entire staff, including hourly incentive workers, had the pride and assurance that we worked for the top tier company with the most respectable history and culture. Unfortunately, this factory was closed in 1970. I was offered a new job in Iowa, but declined as there were many aerospace jobs locally.
I spent the next 50 years in search of an employer of equal character, failing miserably.
Tractors are amazingly focused in their design. They are first and foremost function over form. My brother who runs a vineyard management business in Sonoma has a wide range of tractors. One is a dual fuel International. It starts using gasoline then when it get going it switches over to Diesel. He also has a Fiat that starts by shooting a 12gauge shot blank. All inelegant solutions that are done in the spirit of function.
Good stuff here, Mercedes. As a long time antique tractor enthusiast and collector, I approve this content. Maybe you can get your corporate overlords to send you to an antique tractor show/event or museum. There was a lot of crossover between tractors and automobiles in the early days.
I was never much of a tractor fan until we moved to Paso Robles on California’s Central Coast. Pioneer Day, held downtown every year since the 1930’s on the second Saturday in October, features dozens and dozens of farm tractors. Many are lovingly restored, and they include some from the earliest gas fired days, like the 1910 tractor from the obviously named Gas Tractor Company. Just when you thought you saw them all, more come rolling along. It’s truly impressive.
Apparently my great grandfather had a steam tractor back in the 30s/40s. If I had known I would have asked him about it, he lived to 98, and I was 21 when he passed. In retrospect , there’s a lot of things I wish I’d asked him about, being born in 1916 and all. I would have loved at least one photograph of the undoubtedly massive tractor. Well, maybe my grandma, a hoarder, has one somewhere. She’s 85 and still kicking!
My Dad (86) told of the smaller Case steam tractor they had on the farm in late 1940’s for short time. Used it to run small sawmill. They needed to build a barn. Couldn’t just run down to the lumber yard in those days. You had to go cut down the trees and saw them up before you build the barn. Said they had it set up by the creek for water and used the log off cuts for some of the fuel. Unfortunately, that barn was later struck by lightning and burned to the ground. They had just finished stuffing it with season’s hay. Ouch!
If you’re wanting to overdose on vintage tractors, a couple places in eastern Iowa to check out would be the John Deere Tractor and Engine Museum in Waterloo (on the grounds of the John Deere Works, north of downtown) and the Old Threshers Reunion in Mount Pleasant, held the last weekend in August. Easy drives to both from Chicagoland.
Thus creating the first known instance of a tractor beam.
I learned all I know about tractors from Clarksons Farm. I will not buy a used Lamborgini
Whatever you do, at least measure the barn door first.
And make sure accessories are available to fit. 😀
I wonder if Lamborghini ever considered paying him to NOT use their tractor.