Tanks in the Great War, 1914-1918

by J. F. C. Fuller

All the users of these inventions were destined to disappointment, for the science of mechanics was not sufficiently advanced to render self-movement practical and it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that a fresh attempt was made to reintroduce so essential a weapon as the war cart. The following account of this reintroduction is quoted from Mr. Manchester’s most interesting article:

“After the practical application of steam by Watt in 1765 we find an early attempt to apply it to land transportation in what must be considered the first steam automobile. As early as 1769 Cugnot in France set a steam boiler upon the frame of a wagon and succeeded in making the wagon go. His idea was that this invention could be used in war, and on this presumption he was the next year assisted by the government to construct an improvement. The speed, however, was scarcely more than 2½ miles an hour, and the machine would run only twenty minutes before it had to stop for fifteen minutes to get up more steam. In his first public trial he had the ill-luck to run into and knock down part of a stone wall. This led to his being temporarily cast into jail, and his experiments were abandoned. Napoleon must have visualised the possibilities of Cugnot’s machine for military purposes, for when the great general was selected a member of the French Institute, the subject of his paper was ‘The Automobile in War.’”

The “battle car” had now, at least experimentally, evolved into the steam wagon which could run on roads; the next step was to invent one which would move in any direction across country, in other words to replace the wheels by tracks. The evolution of the caterpillar tractor brings us to the fourth phase in the evolution of the “battle car.”

The idea of distributing the weight of a vehicle over a greater area than that provided by its own wheels is by no means a novel one; one year after Cugnot produced the first steam automobile Richard Lovell Edgeworth patented a device whereby a portable railway could be attached to a wheeled carriage; it consisted of several pieces of wood which moved in regular succession in such a manner that a sufficient length of railing was constantly at rest for the wheels to roll upon. The principle of this device was but a modification of that upon which the tracks of tanks now depend, and all subsequent ideas were founded on this basis.[12]

The endless chain track passed through various early patents. In 1801 Thomas German produced “a means of facilitating the transit of carriages by substituting endless chains or a series of rollers for the ordinary wheels.” This definitely cut adrift from the idea of wheels and replaced it by that of tracks. In 1812 William Palmer produced a somewhat similar invention, and in 1821 John Richard Barry patented a contrivance consisting of two endless pitched chains, stretched out and passing round two chain wheels at the end of the carriage, one on each side, which formed the rails or bearing surface of the vehicle.

Footed wheels were not, however, abandoned, and in 1846 a picture of the Boydell engine shows the wheels of this machine fitted with feet. In 1861 an improved wheel-foot was patented by Andrew Dunlop which was modified by other inventors and by degrees evolved into the pedrail, trials of which were carried out at Aldershot under the War Office in 1905.

In 1882 Guillaume Fender of Buenos Aires suggested and John Newburn patented certain improvements to endless tracks. Fender realised that the attempts to produce endless travelling railways had not met with great success owing to the shortness of the rails or tracks employed; he, therefore, proposed that their length should be the same as the distance between the vehicle’s axles. If it were desired to have short links the number of wheels must be increased; furthermore, should the tractor be used for hauling a train of wagons, the endless track should be long enough to embrace all the wheels. This is the original idea of the all-round track.

Diagram 5. The Applegarth Tractor, 1886.

Among the many interesting patents of about this date were the Applegarth tractor of 1886 (see [Diagram 5]) and the Batter tractor of 1888. In the former the forward portion of the track was inclined and suggests the contour of the track as applied to the front of tanks. The track being raised in front gives an initial elevation when an obstacle is met with and very greatly assists in surmounting banks and other irregularities.