Fugen eBooks

The engine they put out was much the same
as the Nichols-Shepard engine excepting that the engine was up in front,
the boiler in the rear, and the power was applied to the back wheels by
a belt. They could make twelve miles an hour on the road even though the
self-propelling feature was only an incident of the construction. They
were sometimes used as tractors to pull heavy loads and, if the owner
also happened to be in the threshing-machine business, he hitched his
threshing machine and other paraphernalia to the engine in moving from
farm to farm. What bothered me was the weight and the cost. They weighed
a couple of tons and were far too expensive to be owned by other than a
farmer with a great deal of land. They were mostly employed by people
who went into threshing as a business or who had sawmills or some other
line that required portable power.
Even before that time I had the idea of making some kind of a light
steam car that would take the place of horses--more especially, however,
as a tractor to attend to the excessively hard labour of ploughing.


Pages:
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54