Inventions of the Great War

by A. Russell Bond

There is no race-horse that can keep up with an automobile, no deer that can out-run a locomotive. A bicyclist can soon tire out the hardiest of hounds. Why? Because animals run on legs, while machines run on wheels.

As wheels are so much more speedy than legs, it seems odd that we do not find this form of locomotion in nature. There are many animals that owe their very existence to the fact that they can run fast. Why hasn't nature put them on wheels so that when their enemy appears they can roll away, sedately, instead of having to jerk their legs frantically back and forth at the rate of a hundred strokes a minute?

But one thing we must not overlook. Our wheeled machines must have a special road prepared for them, either a macadam highway or a steel track. They are absolutely helpless when they are obliged to travel over rough country. No wheeled vehicle can run through fields broken by ditches and swampy spots, or over ground obstructed with boulders and tree-stumps.

But it is not always possible or practicable to build a road for the machines to travel upon, and it is necessary to have some sort of self-propelled vehicle that can travel over all kinds of ground.

Some time ago a British inventor developed a machine with large wheels on which were mounted the equivalent of feet. As the wheels revolved, these feet would be planted firmly on the ground, one after the other, and the machine would proceed step by step. It could travel over comparatively rough ground, and could actually walk up a flight of stairs. We have a very curious walking-machine in this country. It is a big dredge provided with two broad feet and a "swivel chair." The machine makes progress by alternately planting its feet on the ground, lifting itself up, chair and all, pushing itself forward, and sitting down again.

Although many other types of walking-machines have been patented, none of them has amounted to very much. Clearly, nature hopelessly outclasses us in this form of propulsion.

Years ago it occured to one ingenious man that if wheeled machines must have tracks or roads for their wheels to run on, they might be allowed to lay their own tracks. And so he arranged his track in the form of an endless chain of plates that ran around the wheels of his machine. The wheels merely rolled on this chain, and as they progressed, new links of the track were laid down before them and the links they had passed over were picked up behind them. A number of inventors worked on this idea, but one man in particular, Benjamin Holt, of Peoria, Illinois, brought the invention to a high state of perfection. He arranged a series of wheels along the chain track, each carrying a share of the load of the machine, and each mounted on springs so that it would yield to any unevenness of the ground, just as a caterpillar conforms itself to the hills and dales of the surface it creeps over. In fact, the machine was called a "caterpillar" tractor because of its crawling locomotion.

But it was no worm of a machine. In power it was a very elephant. It could haul loads that would tax the strength of scores of horses. Stumps and boulders were no obstacles in its path. Even ditches could not bar its progress. The machine would waddle down one bank and up the other without the slightest difficulty. It was easily steered; in fact, it could turn around in its own length by traveling forward on one of its chains, or traction-belts, and backward on the other. The machine was particularly adapted to travel on soft or plowed ground, because the broad traction-belts gave it a very wide bearing and spread its weight over a large surface. It was set to work on large farms, hauling gangs of plows and cultivators. Little did Mr. Holt think, as he watched his powerful mechanical elephants at work on the vast Western wheat-fields, that they, or rather their offspring, would some day play a leading role in a war that would rack the whole world.

* * * * *

But we are getting ahead of our story. To start at the very beginning, we must go back to the time when the first savage warrior used a plank of wood to protect himself from the rocks hurled by his enemy. This was the start of the never-ending competition between arms and armor. As the weapons of offense developed from stone to spear, to arrow, to arquebus, the wooden plank developed into a shield of brass and then of steel; and then, since a separate shield became too bothersome to carry, it was converted into armor that the warrior could wear and so have both hands free for battle. For every improvement in arms there was a corresponding improvement in armor.