The Black Tractor

After Harry Ferguson had invented the 3 point linkage he needed a lightweight tractor to demonstrate its advantages. It became clear to him that the only way forward lay in building a prototype tractor incorporating his own inventions which could ultimately be built cheaply and be useful on the smallest farms as well as the largest.

As the design progressed Ferguson insisted that it should be painted black, probably because of his own liking for functional simplicity. The Black Tractor was completed in 1933 and immediately put to test and became the fore-runner of all modern day tractors with its 3 point linkage and hydraulics, weight transference and automatic depth control.

More than any other single development, this invention revolutionised the use of the farm tractor, and nearly all subsequent designs have incorporated its design principles. In particular the Black Tractor was the fore-runner of the TE20, lovingly known as the “Fergie”, a descendant that became a common sight on farms all over Britain and the world in the 1940s and early 1950s.

It is now in the Science Museum, Kensington, London, a fitting place for it to rest, introducing as it did a completely new concept in farm machinery and design.