February a key month in the Ferguson System story
February is known as a special month for innovation as it marks birthdays of some of the worlds greatest ever inventors and inventions. We can think especially of American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, born on the 11th February, 1847 with thousands of inventions he is quite often thought of as the father of the modern age.
The 12th of February is also the anniversary of the birth of British biologist Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882 who was born on the 12th February, 1809 and is known especially as the father of evolutionary biology for proposing the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Harry Ferguson 1884 - 1960 was a man of great vision and purpose and deliberately selected the 12th of February the birthday of Charles Darwin to file his most important inventions. Perhaps rightfully believing his inventions would bring a revolution in farming by the evolution of the farm tractor itself.
Today marks the 101st anniversary of the filing of those inventions by Harry Ferguson in Patent number 253,566 on the 12th February, 1925. The Patent titled “Apparatus for Coupling Agricultural Implements to Tractors and Automatically Regulating the Depth of Work” is today known as the Ferguson Master Patent.
This Patent is the birth certificate of the modern tractor as it contained a vision for the first time in history of how the tractor and quickly changeable implements by different methods could work as one unit. Including the objectives of ease of use, safety and automatic depth control. Harry Ferguson’s idea was that the tractor did not just replace the horse to pull a plough but be a mechanised farming solution. It contains so many important inventions and compellingly makes the case of why Harry Ferguson is today recognised as the father of the modern tractor. Interestingly the first method Harry Ferguson gave was to use electrics to control implements and drive the tractive wheels, in other words an electric tractor, something that in recent years is only now becoming a reality.
The Ferguson Master Patent would be granted on the 14th June, 1926 and so 2026 marks the centenary of its granting.
At that stage in 1926 Harry Ferguson was using a duplex or two point linkage method to attach specially designed implements and as development continued it would become three point linkage using hydraulics that would be invented during 1928 under Patent number 320,084, filed on the 3rd July, 1928.
With the key ideas of Harry Ferguson’s invention of the modern tractor in 1925 it was all about making his vision a reality in a working farming solution at a price that even the poorest farmer could afford and that really was were the hard work started.
From 1931 to 1933 he and his engineers, Archibald Greer, John Chambers and chief engineer William Sands had built the Belfast Black Prototype tractor with hydraulic three point linkage at Ferguson’s workshop in the centre of Belfast. The tractor was then taken in secret for its first tests in January, 1933 to County Tyrone and it quickly became evident that it simply did not work as intended. This must have been so disheartening for Harry Ferguson as a perfectionist. Undeterred he continued to work on his system that took from 1933 to 1935 to perfect as a working Ferguson System on the lands of Thomas MacGregor Greer at Tullylagan Manor, Cookstown. Most of the substantial financial costs being paid by Greer.
From filing the Ferguson Master Patent and the long process of perfecting the Ferguson System in County Tyrone on this day as Harry Ferguson thought back to the first filing of his Ferguson Master Patent and the birth of the modern tractor. He could finally see light at the end of the long dark tunnel, that left him in so much debt. That first chink of light was with a perfected Ferguson System at the end of 1935 and David Brown agreeing to build his Ferguson tractor and implements. The light grew brighter by the filling of the final five Patents crucial to his Ferguson System on the 5th February, 1936, with the special meaning of the 36th day of the 36th year in a new dawn for humanity.
On this day ninety years ago, eleven years from Harry Ferguson’s invention of the modern tractor it must have been a time of great personal joy and achievement for him. All that hard work was finally going to pay off by the production of the world’s first Ferguson System tractors and implements that was clearly then only a matter of a few weeks away.
Stevan Patterson, Castlederg, County Tyrone.