DID - U - KNOW
by Facia Nearside

Benjamin Holt was born in Concord, New Hampshire USA in 1849. He was the youngest of four brothers, all of whom became involved in the family business selling hardwood for wagon and coach construction. These products were in great demand on the west coast and by 1883 all four brothers were engaged in wagon wheel production near San Francisco, California.

Benjamin, who was a gifted mechanic and inventor, was soon making improvements on much of the farm machinery which used their wagon wheels. One of his inventions was a side-hill harvester, a combine which could work on a slope as steep as 30 degrees. While technically a success, the machine was so heavy it required 20 horses to pull it. He realized there had to be a better way!

Traction engines were beginning to take over farm work from horses, a fact not lost upon Holt. However, they were extremely heavy, often weighing 1000 pounds per horsepower. This was a huge problem, especially in Britain where soil is heavy and wet causing traction engines to sink under their own weight. The solution was to somehow lighten the machine or spread the weight out over a larger area, but hundreds of failed tries pointed to the difficulty of conquering this problem.

The First Successful Crawler Tractor

In 1903 Benjamin Holt traveled to England to study ongoing efforts to produce a crawler- type tractor. Upon returning home he set to work solving the issues which stymied those many unsuccessful attempts. On Thanksgiving Day in 1904 Holt demonstrated his design of the first successful tractor to use a continuous track for traction. For Britain the timing could not have been better because a few short years later it found itself mired down in the muck and gore of trench warfare. Holt’s crawler tractors came to the rescue, replacing horses hauling heavy artillery and other supplies. By the end of the war 10,000 Holt tracked vehicles were in use by Allied Forces, and Great Britain recognized Benjamin Holt for his contribution to the war effort. After the war Holt concentrated more on road building equipment than agricultural machinery. Benjamin Hold died December 5th, 1920 and five years later the Holt Manufacturing Co. merged with its largest competitor, C. L. Best. Today we call that company Caterpillar.

Reprinted from British Boots & Bonnets Chronicle — April 2019 issue.