Most of the tractors in use throughout the world have features developed originally by Harry Ferguson. He and his team made an immense contribution to improving the efficiency of farm mechanization, and he also established a highly successful commercial empire.

The success story had a modest beginning on a farm in what is now Northern Ireland, where Harry Ferguson was born on 4th November 1884. The family farm at Growell, County Down, was about a hundred acres, larger than the average in the area but too small to provide more than a fairly simple home.

Living and working on the family farm probably helped Harry Ferguson in his later career, although the toil and routine of a farm worked with horses and manpower were not to his liking. Another factor in his childhood was the austerely religious way of life which his father imposed on the family, and against which Harry increasingly rebelled. Before his eighteenth birthday he decided to leave home to find a way of life away from the farm, He was offered an opportunity to join an elder brother in a garage business he was building up in Belfast. Harry welcomed the idea, which suited his interest in cars and engines.

The garage prospered and built up a good reputation, helped considerably by Harry’s talent for tuning the unreliable engines in use at that time. The business also benefited from his racing success with motor cycles, which was exploited to the full for publicity for the garage.

Another of his early talents, and an outlet for his mechanical aptitude, was aircraft design. When Ferguson first joined his brother’s business in 1902 they were operating on a tight budget. By 1908 there was sufficient money to finance Ferguson’s ambition to design and fly his own aircraft. After numerous failures he made his first flight in December 1909. This was the first time an aircraft had flown in Ireland, and Harry Ferguson was the first person in Britain to design, build and fly his own aircraft. More flights followed, and he might have considered making his career with aircraft, but in 1911 his energies were diverted to making a success of a garage business of his own after breaking away from his brother.

The new garage business included the agency for Vauxhall cars, and Harry Ferguson achieved a good deal of local publicity with Vauxhall on the racing track. Much later, in the 1920’s, he became a leading figure in the campaign to establish a major motor sport event in Northern Ireland. His influence and energy played an important part in starting the famous Ulster Tourist Trophy races in 1928. These attracted some of the most famous cars and drivers in the world to Northern Ireland, drawn by the prestige of the Ards circuit.

Harry Ferguson’s interest in farm mechanization developed during World War 1. Tractors had suddenly become important as the key to increasing food production, and the government launched a ploughing campaign to turn large areas of pasture into more productive arable land. Imported American tractors played a major part in the campaign and the Ferguson garage held the agency for the ‘Overtime’. This was the British name for one of the American imports, a sturdily built and reasonable reliable tractor which became popular in Britain.

Harry Ferguson relied on demonstrations to overcome some of the sales resistance to the tractor, and these were usually carried out with a plough. His activities with the Over­time were noticed by the Irish Board of Agriculture, and in 1917 he was asked to help to improve the standard of tractor operation on Irish farms. Many of the tractors were difficult to use, especially with inexperienced operators and with implements designed originally for use with horses. This work took Ferguson and a talented engineer from his garage who was called William Sands, to many farms where tractors were in use, where they explained and demonstrated how to get the best from the equipment.

What he saw on his travels convinced Ferguson that there must be a more efficient way to use tractor power in the field, and he set to work on the problem. His first approach was to design a plough with a low draft requirement, light in weight, and with an ingenious arrangement of springs to help the tractor driver to raise it out of work. The plough was designed to hitch so closely behind the tractor that depth wheels would not be needed. The plough hitch point was beneath the tractor and ahead of the rear axle, so that the pull on the plough helped to stabilize the tractor and improve the grip of the rear wheels.

With so much variation in tractor dimensions, draw bar positions and power, Ferguson decided to make the plough suitable for one make of tractor. He chose the ‘Eros’, which was a tractor conversion for the Ford Model T car. The kit was made by the E.G. Staude Manufacturing Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, and was one of several conversion kits made for the Model T.

The plough went into production, to be sold as the ‘Belfast’. It attracted some interest and favourable comments on its unusual design, but it failed commercially because Henry Ford’s new Fordson tractors were arriving in large numbers from America. The Fordson put conversions of the Eros type out of business, and with them went the sales potential for the Ferguson plough.

A new plough was designed specifically for the Fordson. This version was also designed to work without a depth wheel. The hitch arrangement consisted of two sets of struts, arranged to keep the plough in work and also to transfer shock loadings on the plough as a downward force at the front of the tractor to prevent the danger of overturning. The struts were the forerunner of a three-point linkage, and were known as the Duplex hitch.

The new plough took Ferguson to the United States where he formed a joint company with the Sherman brothers of Evansville, New York State, to manufacture an improved version of the plough for the American market. Meanwhile development work on the hitch design continued, and in 1928 a hydraulic system for operating the draft control principle was tried as an alternative to a mechanical design. In the same year it was announced that production of Fordson tractors would be transferred from America to Ireland, and this led to the collapse of the Ferguson-Sherman plough business in America.

Fortunately Ferguson was strong enough financially to survive the American setback, and to continue his development work. The Duplex hitch was replaced by a series of experimental arrangements of converging links and systems of three linkage points.

With the Ferguson System on the way towards completion efforts were made to find a manufacturer to put it into production. In his book Harry Ferguson Inventor and Pioneer (published by John Murray) Colin Fraser cites some unexpected names among the companies which were possible partners for Ferguson at that stage. Some of the ship­building companies in Northern Ireland were approached, because they had the spare capacity at the time and because of Harry Ferguson’s hope of building the tractor in Ulster. In America Allis-Chalmers took out an option on some of Ferguson’s patents, and in Britain the Rover car company looked closely at the Ferguson System as a possible way into the tractor market. Ransomes and Rapier of Ipswich and the Rushton tractor company also showed interest, as did Morris Motors of Oxford.

As more companies proved unwilling or unable to find the resources to put the Ferguson ideas into production, it became clear that the advantages would have to be demonstrated. In order to carry out a demonstration, a tractor incorporating the Ferguson patents was designed and built by the team, and was finished in 1933 with a coat of gloss black paint. It became known as the ‘Black Tractor’, and deserves its place in the Science Museum, London, as the tractor which brought the Ferguson System into the world.