The tractor industry is, comparatively, in its infancy, but it has already assumed substantial proportions. It seems destined, in one form and another, to surpass the commercial car industry.
Recently one of the Ford Motor Company’s leading engineers secured a patent on a device to convert an automobile into a tractor. This is done by substituting tractor wheels in place of the rear wheels of the automobile, and by reducing the power transmission gear so that the power of the motor will be used in pulling a load instead of giving speed. In other words, the car in the form of a tractor will be run very slow and the power saved in this way will be applied to pulling the load.
The wheels may be changed in a few minutes from pleasure to tractor, and from tractor to pleasure. With this device the farmer can have his car for pleasure and business trips, and when he gets ready to do farm work he can convert it into a tractor to do the work of half a dozen horses or more, and at very much less expense.
A valuable feature of this invention is that when a car becomes worn out for pleasure use it will still be as good as a new one to form a tractor with this device.
The device was thoroughly tested in all kinds of farm work throughout the season of 1916, and found to work perfectly and highly satisfactorily in every way.
The progress of the automobile industry has surprised some of our ablest economists, and it has given the long-faced, wiseacre, conservative financier a clean knock-out blow.
Having no precedent to guide them but human nature, the economists were unable to arrive at satisfactory conclusions in regard to the future of the industry and it ran away from their estimates.
Mr. J. George Frederick, of the New York Business Bourse, is perhaps in possession of more business facts, figures and data of all kinds than anyone else in this country, and is regarded as one of the highest authorities on business economics.
“Writing on this phase of the automobile industry in the October, 1915, number of the American Review of Reviews, Mr. Frederick said:
“With 2,000,000 automobile owners today, and every indication that the annual production will be more than the 703,000 produced this year, we face in plain facts a probable annual sale of over 1,000,000 automobiles every year, on an average, for the next five years at least. Until the automobile became popular there were about 1,000,000 carriages sold each year, and as these were undoubtedly sold mainly to rural and suburban population there is sound reason to believe that 2,000,000 automobiles per year is not an extravagant future prediction in the slightly more distant future.”