William Sands, Harry Ferguson’s problem solving chief engineer

William Sands was a very gifted engineer and designer in his own right and is best remembered for being Harry Ferguson’s chief engineer, tester, researcher and problem solver. He is rightfully deserving of having a blue plaque in his honour for which I have nominated him.

He achieved so much in helping to modernise agriculture along with Harry Ferguson, but sadly he is often overlooked and a further example of a life story that the Harry Ferguson Museum of Innovation will address.

William Sands when young was a keen motorcycle enthusiast that competed in motorcycle trials and races coming to the attention of Harry Ferguson who was also a motorcycle enthusiast.Harry saw Sands' potential and employed him in 1911 as a mechanic/engineer when he established his first business at May Street Motors in Belfast.

Together they saw technology as a way to improve lives and Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom was the best way to achieve that success. As committed Unionists both signed the Ulster Covenant on Ulster Day, September 28, 1912 against home rule in Ireland.

Ferguson came up with ideas and left the detail in joining the dots to Sands who had a great ability to think logically, solve problems and engineer practical working solutions. It is clear from Sands own inventions recorded in patents that he was also a great innovator and achiever that was able to think outside the box- developing new ideas and technologies.

As well as selling cars and motorcycles, Ferguson took on the dealership of tractors. One of them called Overtime in the British Isles – a renamed Waterloo Boy tractor made in the USA that for obvious reasons with Britain and France being allies the name Waterloo could not be used.Interestingly the Waterloo Boy Company was purchased in 1918 by John Deere to get the company into the tractor business after failed attempts to build their own tractors. Ferguson had the sole dealership rights in Ireland for the Overtime tractor.

During the Great War, German U-boats directly targeted ships many loaded with imports of grain in an attempt to starve the people of the British Isles into surrender. By early 1917 this meant only about two additional week’s supply of food remained.

The Irish Board of Agriculture, as part of UK-wide schemes to address this by growing more food at home, recruited Ferguson and Sands because of their expertise in tractors and ploughs. They started work on March 19, 1917 at 5am heading off on a car supplied for them as part of the job which they usually slept in, visiting every single owner of tractor in turn across the country. Showing farmers how to correctly adjust and get the best from their tractors and ploughs, on completion they could justifiably claim that the success the ploughing up campaign in Ireland achieved during 1917 was largely down to them.

Around 1916 it became clear to Ferguson and Sands that the plough in particular had major failings and Ferguson began work on designing his first plough assisted by Sands. The first Ferguson plough would go on sale in 1917.

Known as the Ferguson Belfast plough it was designed to directly attach by a single link to the popular tractor conversion of the Ford Model T car called the “Eros”. It was manufactured in the Ferguson workshop at Belfast by Sands and another apprentice patent making engineer, Archibald Greer that Ferguson employed to help Sands build the ploughs. Sands would engineer improvements and make the Ferguson Belfast plough directly fit the new 1917 Fordson tractor that was built by Henry Ford in the USA. The original single point linkage becoming two or Duplex by the end of 1919.

After a meeting in 1920 between Henry Ford and Harry Ferguson that did not go well and Ford refused to put the plough into production as hoped for by Ferguson, Sands went to work on his own starting a successful motor repair and hire business. Without mass production, he saw no future in the plough and working for Ferguson.

Ferguson would realise that he needed Sands and by 1922 when a company in the USA agreed to mass produce the plough, Sands would return to work for Ferguson. In reality it did not take that much to persuade him to return as he understood the importance of what was trying to be achieved. Following Sands return, major advances were rapid resulting in the invention of the modern tractor with quickly interchangeable implements in 1925 by Harry Ferguson. There is no doubt that Sands played a crucial role in the invention.

Converging three point hydraulic linkage would follow, at first two upper links and a lower link was used, but due to control issues it was Sands who made the suggestion of moving the lower middle single link to the top and this established the three point linkage that we know today with a single upper link and two lower links set to converge.

William Sands would play a big part in the design and building of the world’s first Ferguson System tractor the Ferguson Belfast Black prototype tractor built from 1931 – 1933 in Belfast and perfected by 1935 in the quiet fields of County Tyrone at Tullylagan owned by Thomas MacGregor Greer, the man who paid the bills.

William Sands would be involved in the design and development of the world’s first production Ferguson System tractor the Ferguson Brown Type A introduced in 1936 and the first mass produced Ferguson System tractor the revolutionary little grey Ford-Ferguson introduced in 1939, both of them as Ferguson’s chief engineer. He would also importantly design implements, a key part of the Ferguson System of farm mechanisation, after all Ferguson System tractors required a range of dedicated implements.

William Sands would modify Ferguson-Brown Type A serial number 3 a prototype tractor, hand fabricating a complete new back end from steel plate so that a central power take off could be fitted, the last part of the Ferguson System linkage. He would also section or cut away the back end of the first Ford-Ferguson to arrive in Northern Ireland that was used by Harry Ferguson to show how his Ferguson System worked as fitted to the Ford-Ferguson in 1940.

While Harry Ferguson was in the USA, William Sands and Archibald Greer in Northern Ireland from the early 1940s would design a number of implements including the Ferguson Belfast potato digger and Ferguson Belfast steerage cultivator that were built at the Ferguson factory in Moira.

The long-time working relationship between William Sands and Harry Ferguson would end after the war when Ferguson tractor production was established in England and Sands did not want to travel anymore preferring to live in Northern Ireland.

Following the commencement of a court case in 1948 by Harry Ferguson against the Ford Motor Company, who continued to build the Ford 8N tractor that was simply a Ford-Ferguson without Ferguson’s permission, the Ford Motor Company persuaded Sands to testify that the majority of the ideas leading to the Ferguson System where his.

But there is no doubt the system was Ferguson’s and as Sands was employed by Ferguson any input in design belonged to the Ferguson Company. Harry Ferguson took what he himself described as a “betrayal” of long-time friend and his past chief engineer very hard. In 1952 Harry Ferguson would win the court case in a consent judgement and the Ford Motor Company agreed to pay him 9.25M Dollars for patent infringements and stop production of the Ford 8N tractor by the end of 1952.

Later in the 1950s it is nice to know that Ferguson and Sands would meet and reconcile, putting their past differences behind them, becoming friends once again. Ferguson even agreed to give Sands a very generous pension as a way of saying thinks. Ferguson knew that he owed Sands a great deal as he was the engineering talent with technical knowhow that made his genius ideas work.

Harry Ferguson who was not easy to impress, lavished praise on Archibald Greer and William Sands saying: “Nor could any words of mine express appreciation of what we owe to Mr William Sands and Mr Archibald Greer. To William Sands in particular, I would pay the highest possible tribute. These men have surely the right to a high place in the future of mechanised farming. To their engineering skill, their patience, and cheery co-operation in all our trials, I pay the highest possible complement.”

William John Sands would pass away in his sleep on October 8, 1981 at home in Belfast. He was 90 years old and was buried in Lisburn Cemetery.