The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRACTOR
The planning of the tractor really antedated that of the motor car. Out on the 
farm my first experiments were with tractors, and it will be remembered that 
I was employed for some time by a manufacturer of steam tractors—the big 
heavy road and thresher engines. But I did not see any future for the large 
tractors. They were too expensive for the small farm, required too much skill 
to operate, and were much too heavy as compared with the pull they exerted. 
And anyway, the public was more interested in being carried than in being 
pulled; the horseless carriage made a greater appeal to the imagination. And 
so it was that I practically dropped work upon a tractor until the automobile 
was in production. With the automobile on the farms, the tractor became a 
necessity. For then the farmers had been introduced to power.
The farmer does not stand so much in need of new tools as of power to run 
the tools that he has. I have followed many a weary mile behind a plough and 
I know all the drudgery of it. What a waste it is for a human being to spend 
hours and days behind a slowly moving team of horses when in the same 
time a tractor could do six times as much work! It is no wonder that, doing 
everything slowly and by hand, the average farmer has not been able to earn 
more than a bare living while farm products are never as plentiful and cheap 
as they ought to be.
As in the automobile, we wanted power—not weight. The weight idea was 
firmly fixed in the minds of tractor makers. It was thought that excess weight 
meant excess pulling power—that the machine could not grip unless it were 
heavy. And this in spite of the fact that a cat has not much weight and is 
a pretty good climber. I have already set out my ideas on weight. The only 
kind of tractor that I thought worth working on was one that would be light, 

---

182  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
strong, and so simple that any one could run it. Also it had to be so cheap that 
any one could buy it.
With these ends in view, we worked for nearly fifteen years on a design and 
spent some millions of dollars in experiments. We followed exactly the same 
course as with the automobile. Each part had to be as strong as it was possi-
ble to make it, the parts had to be few in number, and the whole had to admit 
of quantity production. We had some thought that perhaps the automobile 
engine might be used and we conducted a few experiments with it. But finally 
we became convinced that the kind of tractor we wanted and the automobile 
had practically nothing in common. It was the intention from the beginning 
that the tractor should be made as a separate undertaking from the auto-
mobile and in a distinct plant. No plant is big enough to make two articles.
The automobile is designed to carry; the tractor is designed to pull—to 
climb. And that difference in function made all the difference in the world 
in construction. The hard problem was to get bearings that would stand up 
against the heavy pull. We finally got them and a construction which seems 
to give the best average performance under all conditions. We fixed upon a 
four-cylinder engine that is started by gasoline but runs thereafter on kero-
sene. The lightest weight that we could attain with strength was 2,425 pounds. 
The grip is in the lugs on the driving wheels—as in the claws of the cat.
In addition to its strictly pulling functions, the tractor, to be of the greatest 
service, had also to be designed for work as a stationary engine so that when 
it was not out on the road or in the fields it might be hitched up with a belt to 
run machinery. In short, it had to be a compact, versatile power plant. And 
that it has been. It has not only ploughed, harrowed, cultivated, and reaped, 
but it has also threshed, run grist mills, saw mills, and various other sorts 
of mills, pulled stumps, ploughed snow, and done about everything that a 
plant of moderate power could do from sheep-shearing to printing a newspa-
per. It has been fitted with heavy tires to haul on roads, with sledge runners 
for the woods and ice, and with rimmed wheels to run on rails. When the 
shops in Detroit were shut down by coal shortage, we got out the Dearborn 
Independent by sending a tractor to the electro-typing factory—stationing 
the tractor in the alley, sending up a belt four stories, and making the plates 
by tractor power. Its use in ninety-five distinct lines of service has been called 
to our attention, and probably we know only a fraction of the uses.
The mechanism of the tractor is even more simple than that of the auto-
mobile and it is manufactured in exactly the same fashion. Until the present 
year, the production has been held back by the lack of a suitable factory. The 
first tractors had been made in the plant at Dearborn which is now used as 
an experimental station. That was not large enough to affect the economies 
of large-scale production and it could not well be enlarged because the design 

---

The Tractor and Power Farming  •  183
was to make the tractors at the River Rouge plant, and that, until this year, 
was not in full operation.
Now that plant is completed for the making of tractors. The work flows 
exactly as with the automobiles. Each part is a separate departmental 
undertaking and each part as it is finished joins the conveyor system which 
leads it to its proper initial assembly and eventually into the final assembly. 
Everything moves and there is no skilled work. The capacity of the present 
plant is one million tractors a year. That is the number we expect to make—
for the world needs inexpensive, general-utility power plants more now than 
ever before—and also it now knows enough about machinery to want such 
plants.
The first tractors, as I have said, went to England. They were first 
offered in the United States in 1918 at $750. In the next year, with the 
higher costs, the price had to be made $885; in the middle of the year it 
was possible again to make the introductory price of $750. In 1920 we 
charged $790; in the next year we were sufficiently familiar with the pro-
duction to begin cutting. The price came down to $625 and then in 1922 
with the River Rouge plant functioning we were able to cut to $395. All 
of which shows what getting into scientific production will do to a price. 
Just as I have no idea how cheaply the Ford automobile can eventually 
be made, I have no idea how cheaply the tractor can eventually be made.