Small is Beautiful

Henry ('Harry') Ferguson left a small Irish farm in 1902 to work in his brother's car and bicycle garage in Belfast. He discovered his talent for mechanical engineering and became a lifelong inventor. He was the first person in Britain or Ireland to build and fly his own aeroplane; in later life, he invented the first four-wheel drive Formula One car. In between, he created the innovation for which he is best known, and which remains a key feature of tractor technology

He set up his own, independent a farm machinery business and tried out American-made tractors, but concluded that their design - based on the drawbar of horse-drawn machinery - was unsuitable for the small fields and hilly terrain of Irish small farms; in fact the set-up was unstable and unsafe. Instead, he designed and developed the 'three-point linkage': three points of attachment between the tractor and the plough (or, eventually, other implements). The two lower links - one on each side - are hydraulically-powered arms that move up and down. The third link is a simple bar (of adjustable length) that attaches the top of the plough frame to a bolt below the tractor seat. All the fixings use ball-joints to achieve a degree of independent movement between tractor and plough

Ferguson's business acumen was not as good as his engineering. He got involved with the Ford corporation and ended up suing them for for breach of patent when they failed to honour a handshake deal he made with Henry Ford I. Ferguson won the case, but the payout was not enough to shore up his company. Eventually he sold it to the Massey-Harris corporation, and Massey-Ferguson was born

A large, charity tractor rally took lunch at the brewery today. Inevitably, it included restored examples of the iconic Ferguson TE - the 'little grey Fergie' - manufactured in Coventry and sold worldwide, before the birth of Massey-Ferguson. Huge contemporary MF machines also featured. I wonder what Harry would have thought of them. He turned down a knighthood for "services to the Allies" in WWII, saying that all his innovation had been for the good of the small farmer. Back in his Co. Down birthplace, a statue of him leans on a five-barred gate, surveying a landscape comprised of just such small farms

Late edit: I have discovered that this tractor run was quite a blip phenomenon. See here and here