Excerpt from Gasoline Tractors: A Practical Presentation of Tractor Problems and Their Solution Development of Tractor Industry. According to a recent issue Of a directory of the industry one hundred and thirty-five different American manufacturers are building over two hundred models of tractors. This statement holds good only for the time at which it is written since both the number of manufacturers in the field and the number of models the Old and the new entrants are turning out are constantly on the increase. The use of tractors on large farms dates back almost half a century, but up to less than ten years ago they were all of the steam-driven type. Their first cost as well as the expense of maintenance made them practical only on very large farms where skilled labor is constantly employed. This bit of history is mentioned merely to emphasize the infancy of the industry as'it now exists, a factor that makes it exceedingly difficult to classify the product Of all the manufacturers in the field and even harder for'the prospective purchaser to make his selection of a machine. The business of building gasoline and Oil driven. Tractors only dates back to about 1910, and for the first five years of its existence its progress was not very rapid. Conse quently it is only during the last four years or so that most of the many manufacturers mentioned have entered the field in response to the great demand for tractors On the part Of the farmers, caused by the acute shortage of farm labor and the corresponding increase in wages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.