Farmers Didn't Invent Tractors. They Were Busy Farming. | Hacker News Reader

Farmers Didn't Invent Tractors. They Were Busy Farming.

ben.casnocha.com

49 pointsneilc14 comments

Sorry, they do.

A farmer friend of my dad had a large dryland farm, and decided to hook two tractors together. He removed the front wheels from each, connected the back tractor to the hitch of the front tractor, linked the throttles together and had a double-size tractor, with four high-traction wheels. Hydraulics from the front tractor were used to steer the tractors.

This same fellow built a developing tank for b&w movie film, and did a lot of time lapse photography. This is on a farm in Montana in the 1960s.

He built a jig to help build these for other farmers who wanted them.

Later, Case and other manufacturers populated the dryland farms with something that looked very similar.

What many people do not realize is that rural farm america has had a more thorough impact on daily life by technology than any other segment of life. From the beginning of my grandfather's generation through the end of my father's generation saw a nearly two orders of magnitude improvement in productivity. Every aspect of daily life was affected.

"Busy farming" in our life meant plowing the fields, seeding, harvesting, which involves machinery, or in my grandfather's generation horses. Everybody had a shop, which included torches, electric and acetylene, a wide range of tools. Something breaks, which it often does at the worst possible time, you generally fix it. Changed plugs in all your vehicles, gapped the plug, points, changed the oil, put in a new head gasket. During family get-togethers, my Dad and Uncles would sit around while waiting for dinner figuring out how to make something work better. Innovation is part of farming.

So the headline is wrong, the article is wrong, and the quote it points to is wrong. Some of the comments do offer some correction. And apparently there is a bit of "Blub" phenomenon going on with what does "Busy Farming" mean.

That headline didn't pass the smell test for me, so I decided to do some quick research... who did invent the tractor, anyway?

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/220609/John-Froehl...

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was John Froehlich - an Iowa blacksmith - who invented the first gasoline-powered tractor. Apparently a Frenchman (nicolas cugnot) had a steam-powered tractor in 1769, but apparently this was not used for agriculture.

Can't find precisely where he lived, but I imagine that as an Iowan blacksmith he had some experience with the demands and opportunities in farm work.

Any bets that he grew up on a farm?

But the blogger's original point is that people with a different point of view make inventions outside their own itch. My contention is really the opposite.

A quick google search indicates that he ran a feed mill and took a threshing crew to ND every year, and the tractor was developed to address problems he encountered doing that work.

One of a few rough sources: http://iagenweb.org/boards/clayton/biographies/index.cgi?rea...

So, yeah, it's actually a perfect example of someone taking his technical skills and using them to come up with an innovative solution to something close to home.

If this page is correct

http://www.geocities.com/motorcity/downs/9828/fergy_12.htm

it was probably somewhere near Waterloo

    > This was the first tractor built by Froelich who with
    > others formed the Waterloo GasolineTraction Engine
    > Company. This company manufactured the Waterloo Boy
    > tractors starting in 1914. The Waterloo Company was
    > purchased by John Deere in 1918 and became the John
    > DeereTractor Company.

As of not too long ago, almost everyone was somehow involved in agriculture, and if they managed not to be, they were surrounded by people that were. this is a link to a good ted talk on how recent it is that we got the luxury not to think about food, and ideas on what that means: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/louise_fresco_on_feeding_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Truly_Large_Numbers

Farmers, especially in the era when the tractor would've come about, were inventing things to use them, not to patent, attract VC investment, conduct publicity campaigns, and settle into the 4-hour work week.

Eric von Hippel's book "Democratizing Innovation" talks about this.

The book is primarily about how end users more than ever are driving innovation, but he provides plenty of historical evidence of this being possible for a long time.

There is a chapter that analyses the type of innovation that a user is likely to make versus the innovations a tool producer is likely to make. A user has the domain knowledge to realize that e.g. a tool with a particular shape might be necessary. A tool producer has the knowledge of metallurgy or tool production to realize that some new alloy might be a better fit for the type of stresses that this tool requires.

He also notes that not all users will innovate, it will primarily be what he calls "lead users".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_user

The book is CC licenced and available for free download. It's got far more insight than this glib blog entry:

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm

Accepting the premise, I think the most interesting question is: how do non-farmers learn enough about farmers' problems to solve one?

Generally, how do non-specialists find enough out about a specialized world to solve a problem from that world? And then, learn enough about the specialist culture to successfully sell into that culture?

(Not accepting the premise, a few clicks through gives its origin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs#The_Economy_of_Citi...)

Short answer is: they're brought in as "consultants."

By "consultants" I don't mean blue-suited guys from Accenture. A consultant could be the local machinist who is asked to make a gearbox to connect two diesel engines together and then realizes that he could sell a bunch of them to other farmers.

There is considerable value in having friends whose interests are radically different from your own.

You have to spend significant time there, would be one way. A related but seemingly tangential question is when a young rancher is about to be married, he would do well to pick a rancher's daughter.

Better for the farm boy to go to college, pick up a wide range of ideas, go back to the farm. Probably the best way to get outside ideas implemented.

Right -- the big question here is, What is the optimal amount of knowledge you should have about a problem / market? There are diminishing returns at some point.

See "How to Learn About Everything" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=628413

And I don't see "diminishing returns" in knowledge as significant. There is always something else relevant to learn, maybe in another field but still relevant.

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