The story of Fordson tractors begins with the great Henry Ford himself. Born in 1863 in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford’s parents had moved to the USA from near Cork in Ireland and now ran a large farm of several hundred acres. The young Henry soon found farm work very hard and preferred tinkering with machines rather than labouring on the farm. He built his first vehicle in 1896 and, in 1903, formed the Ford Motor Company using his principles of mass production to keep costs down.
Henry did not want to stop there, he also wanted to mechanise the drudgery of farming and so started work on several tractor prototypes from 1906 but these had to play second fiddle to the new Model T car that would make Henry Ford’s name world famous.
However, there was now a growing need for tractors on the farms of America and elsewhere and so many small manufacturers turned to converting Ford’s cars into tractors. Basing the design on a car did mean that the tractor would be limited in its usefulness – what was really needed was a purpose built machine.
The only way to achieve this was to build a ‘new from the ground up’ design. Fifteen X Model prototypes were built, largely the brainchild of Ford’s Chief Engineer, Eugene Farkas. Work started in 1915 with power coming from a Hercules four cylinder side-valve engine developing around 20hp.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Britain had been at war since 1914 and German U-Boats had managed to cause severe shortages of imported food. Home food production needed a big boost, but horse and man power was now very limited due to the conflict. What was needed was reliable mechanical power.
With this in mind one of the X type prototypes was shipped to the UK and was so successful that the British Ministry of Munitions placed an order for 6000 straight away! Although the design was not yet finalised, the urgent need for these machines resulted in the first Fordson tractors entering production.