Antique Power

Antique Power is a magazine full of very interesting articles about old tractors and last night I learned something new. How many of you know about The Ford Tractor? No, not that Ford, not Henry's Ford. This is a different Ford. The very first Ford Tractor was the brainchild of W. B. Ewing. This man, apparently, wanted to make big dollars by using the Ford name. (Henry Ford was still designing his tractor when The First Ford Tractor was built.) Mr. Ewing hired a man whose last name was Ford and was no obvious relative of Henry's. Mr. Ewing hired this man to justify using the Ford name. He then began to market his tractor. However, his tractor had some major flaws and never amounted to much of anything. It was very hard to start and was so heavy it could hardly move, let alone pull anything, sounds like me...
He sold a tractor to a fellow in Nebraska, Mr. Crozier. This man was very disappointed in the tractor. In fact he thought he was buying one of Henry's Fords. The tractor did such a poor job he decided to get a replacement from the wanna be Ford people. After much haggling he got one which in turn was less useable than its brother. A year later he was elected to the Nebraska Legislature and received an earful of complaints about this sorry excuse of a tractor and the dishonest manufacturers. This was the beginning of tractor testing. Mr. Crozier and Senator Charles Warner decided to put an end to this nonsense and put together what is now known as the Nebraska Tractor Test Law. This law is still in existence and is used to certify that tractors sold in Nebraska are actually what the salesman claims it is. Since 1919 every tractor model made in the US and 25 participating countries have its performance verified at the University of Nebraska Test Laboratory.
I am amazed that someone living in the early nineteen hundreds could be so wicked...
Anyway, this has been your history lesson for the century...
Thanks to Antique Power your knowledge of our nations past has become better-rounded