The Science of Spin by Roland Ennos

Author:Roland Ennos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

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However, though innovative design had enabled motor vehicles to conquer the roads and skies by the early years of the twentieth century, the same cannot be said of the open country. Arable land continued to be plowed and harvested using horse-drawn tools, and the numbers of draft horses actually continued to increase, both in Europe and the United States, reaching a peak in the 1930s. And in the First World War, trucks all too easily got bogged down in rutted roads and were hopeless in the shell-pocked hell of the battlefields themselves. Consequently, guns continued to be drawn by horses, and fresh troops had to march miles from the rail terminals of France up to the Western Front. It was only late in the war that French and British military engineers came up with the solution to drive motor vehicles over rough terrain. The caterpillar track was yet another extension of bicycle technology: a huge chain that could spread the load of the vehicle over a wide area and even enable it to cross trenches. The tank was developed independently in the two countries; the British version (the name tank derives from the code name for this secret weapon, a “water tank for Macedonia”) had huge quadrilateral tracks that ran around the whole vehicle and had cannons mounted in pods at each side. The French version, in contrast, resembled more modern tanks with lower-level tracks and a fully rotating gun turret on top.

In agriculture, the problem of driving vehicles over soft ground was quickly overcome, simply by using bigger, wider wheels, with giant metal or pneumatic rubber tires. The remaining difficulty was how to use tractors to pull agricultural machinery. The obvious answer was simply to attach a plow or harrow to a tow bar at the back of the tractor, just as they were yoked to teams of heavy horses. The downside to this solution, however, was that if a plow hit a stone or dug too deep into the ground, its resistance to being pulled forward would shoot up. Using a horse team, this was not a problem; the horses would simply stop and wait until the plowman rectified the situation. Using a tractor, the engine would continue to rotate the wheels relative to the tractor, which would turn over backward, falling on and sometimes killing the farmer. This was a particular problem for the most popular early tractor, Henry Ford’s small Fordson. It was only overcome by yet another former bicycle mechanic, the Irishman Harry Ferguson, who in his youth had built and flown the first successful Irish airplane. In his three-point hitch, the tools were attached via a three-point hydraulic linkage to the back of the tractor. This arrangement meant that a wide range of tools could be rigidly attached, and be raised to take them to the field, before being lowered into the ground for use. The arrangement also moved the center of gravity of the unit farther back so that the large

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