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This tractor trivia quiz has 60 free questions with answers and starts where the word itself started, with the Latin 'trahere', and rolls through the whole story of the machine: John Froelich's 1892 gasoline engine in Iowa, Hart-Parr coining the word 'tractor', Henry Ford's Fordson, the Ford-Ferguson handshake, the Farmall row-crop revolution and the Little Grey Fergie that reached the South Pole. There is plenty of brand lore for the shed-and-showground crowd - why Allis-Chalmers went orange, what Minneapolis-Moline called its yellow, why old Deeres are 'Johnny Poppers' - along with Lamborghini and Porsche tractors, the Big Bud 747, the JCB Fastrac speed record, the Nebraska Tractor Test Law and the 540 rpm PTO. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups for anyone who has driven a tractor; the rest climb toward collector-club territory. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and manufacturer histories, and each explanation adds one more fact worth knowing.
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Q 01The word 'tractor' comes from the Latin verb 'trahere'. What does it mean?
To pull
This root gives English 'traction' and 'tractable'; the farm-machine sense grew out of the earlier phrase 'traction engine'.
Q 02In what year was 'tractor' first recorded meaning a vehicle for pulling wagons or ploughs?
1896
It grew out of the phrase 'traction motor', which had been in use since 1859, well before petrol engines reached the farm.
Q 03Which Hart-Parr sales manager is credited with coining the word 'tractor' in 1907?
W. H. Williams
Hart-Parr's Model 3 of 1903 is recognised by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as the first successful farm tractor powered by an internal-combustion engine.
Q 04The pioneering Hart-Parr tractor company was organised in 1901 in which town?
Charles City, Iowa
Charles Hart and Charles Parr met as students at the University of Wisconsin and pooled $3,000 to start their gasoline-engine business after graduating in 1897.
Q 05In which state did John Froelich build the first forward-and-reverse gasoline tractor in 1892?
Iowa
Froelich and his blacksmith bolted a one-cylinder Van Duzen engine onto a Robinson frame, then hitched it to a Case thresher and threshed 72,000 bushels in 52 days.
Q 06In 1918 Deere & Company bought its way into the tractor business by purchasing which Iowa firm?
Waterloo Gasoline Engine Co.
The purchase cost $2,100,000, and Deere kept selling the popular Waterloo Boy under its own name until the Model D arrived in 1923.
Q 07John Deere made his famous 1837 self-scouring plow in Grand Detour, Illinois, from what?
A steel saw blade
Deere was a blacksmith born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1804; the business he started was incorporated as Deere & Company in 1868.
Q 08Where is Deere & Company headquartered?
Moline, Illinois
The company's leaping-deer logo has changed many times since the 1870s but has always kept the animal in mid-jump.
Q 09Until which year did the John Deere Model D, introduced in 1923, stay in production?
1953
The D was Deere's first mass-produced tractor; 55,929 were built at Waterloo over its thirty-year life.
Q 10Old John Deere tractors earned the nickname 'Johnny Popper' because of what?
The exhaust note of their two-cylinder engines
Farm lore says wives could hear the tractor idling down for the trip home and time lunch accordingly.
Q 11In which city did John Deere unveil its 'New Generation of Power' tractors to dealers on 30 August 1960?
Dallas
The four- and six-cylinder '10' series, headlined by the 4010, ended the two-cylinder era that had made the company's name.
Q 12Which of these slogans belongs to the maker of the green-and-yellow tractors with the leaping-stag logo?
Nothing Runs Like a Deere
The company's farm machines are painted a distinctive green with yellow trim, a scheme so recognisable it has been the subject of trademark disputes.
Q 13John Deere introduced a self-driving tractor at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of which year?
2022
Q 21Massey-Harris merged with Harry Ferguson's company in which year?
1953
The clumsy 'Massey-Harris-Ferguson' name was shortened to Massey Ferguson in 1958, a year after the first MF-badged tractor, the MF35, left the factory.
Q 22Which corporation has owned Massey Ferguson since buying it in 1994?
AGCO
The price was $328 million in cash plus $18 million in stock; the millionth Massey Ferguson-branded tractor rolled out almost three decades later.
Q 23Which company introduced the Farmall, the row-crop tractor that outsold all rivals from 1924 to 1963?
International Harvester
Its narrow-front tricycle layout and high ground clearance let it cultivate between growing rows, something the Fordson could not do.
That year the company also ranked No. 84 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest US corporations.
Q 14Henry Ford's mass-produced Fordson tractor went on sale in which year?
1917
The British Ministry of Munitions ordered it for wartime food production, and by 1925 Ford had built its 500,000th Fordson.
Q 15Fordson tractors were built in Cork, Ireland, and later in which English town from 1933 to 1964?
Dagenham
Ford engineer Eugene Farkas designed the Fordson without a conventional frame, making the engine block, transmission and rear axle carry the loads.
Q 16The 1939 Ford 9N was the first American production tractor to incorporate which invention?
Three-point hitch
It sold for $585 complete with rubber tyres, hydraulics, an electric starter and a battery, and took its name from the year (9) and product type (N).
Q 17Harry Ferguson and Henry Ford sealed their famous 'handshake agreement' at Dearborn in which year?
1938
The deal collapsed after Henry Ford II ended it, and Ferguson's lawsuit against Ford was settled out of court in 1952 for just over $9 million.
Q 18Before tractors, Harry Ferguson made history on 31 December 1909 as the first Irish person to do what?
Fly an aeroplane he built
Ferguson was born at Growell, near Dromore in County Down, and later built the four-wheel-drive Ferguson P99, the only 4WD car ever to win a Formula One race.
Q 19The 'Little Grey Fergie' was officially the TE20. What did the letters TE stand for?
Tractor England
Its American cousin, the TO20 built in Detroit from 1948, used a Continental engine; Coventry alone turned out 517,651 TEs by 1956.
Q 20Ferguson TE20 tractors first reached the South Pole as part of which expedition?
Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition
Seven of the little grey tractors made the 1955-58 crossing, and others were used in flood relief work in Australia.
Q 24In which year did IH repaint its whole tractor line in 'Farmall Red'?
1936
The change covered frame, sheet metal, engine and wheels, and the colour is still the signature of Case IH today.
Q 25Which industrial designer gave the 1939 Farmall Letter Series its streamlined look?
Raymond Loewy
Dreyfuss did the equivalent job for John Deere's styled tractors of the era, so the two great rivals were dressed by two of America's most famous designers.
Q 26The Farmall H (1939-1954) is the best-selling row-crop tractor of all time. Roughly how many were sold?
420,000
That made it the number two selling tractor of any kind in North America, behind only one Ford model.
Q 27What did IH call the Farmall Cub's offset engine, which let the driver see the crop row?
CultiVision
More than 245,000 Cubs were built at Louisville, Kentucky, between 1947 and 1981, making it arguably the most popular small tractor ever.
Q 28Case IH was formed in 1985 when which conglomerate merged J.I. Case with IH's farm-equipment business?
Tenneco
Two years later the new firm launched the Magnum, the first tractor designed jointly by Case and IH engineers.
Q 29In 1986 Case IH bought which four-wheel-drive tractor maker, later retiring its lime-green paint?
Steiger
Brothers Douglass and Maurice Steiger built their first tractor as farmers near Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, and the company moved to Fargo, North Dakota, in 1969.
Q 30Allis-Chalmers' famous 'Persian Orange' paint, adopted in 1929, was inspired by which flower?
The California poppy
Sales manager Harry Merritt saw the poppies in bloom while in California and picked the closest available paint colour.