Harry FERGUSON

Harry Ferguson (pictured) was an Ulsterman born in County Down, in 1884 and was the son of a farmer.

He was no scholar and after school was contemplating emigration to Canada rather than to have to work on his father’s farm. He like Henry Ford was appalled by the drudgery and toil that farm workers endured. By his early twenties he worked at his brother Joe garage in Belfast where he showed he had a genius for mechanics. He tuned and raced motorcycles and later would do the same with cars. He even persuaded Joe that it would be good for their garage business to build and fly a new fangled airplane. Throughout 1909 construction of the airplane took place and on the 31 December 1909 it flew. Thus Harry Ferguson made the first flight in Ireland and was the first Briton to build and fly his own airplane.

During WWI Ferguson was asked to put his mechanical genius to work on improving agricultural equipment, which led him into experimental researches on tractors and ploughs. By 1916 Ferguson manufactured the ‘Belfast Plough’. It was produced as the result of Harry Ferguson's inventive streak and Willie Sands (his chief engineer) engineering ability. It was designed for use with the Eros, a tractor conversion of the Ford Model T car. When Fordson introduced the model F tractor shortly after this, Willie Sands was able to make an adapter for the plough. The very first Ferguson System was operated by means of an arrangement of springs and levers.

In 1925 Ferguson looked towards the US market and in partnership with Ebner and George Sherman, founded Ferguson-Sherman Inc. Ferguson-Sherman Inc. produced and sold the Ferguson plough with his patented ‘Duplex’ hitch system suitable to fit Fordson tractors. This association would later, in 1938, lead the Sherman brothers, who were Fordson agents and known to Henry Ford, to introduce him to Ferguson.

It was between 1925 and 1928 that he was granted patents for the Draft Control Hydraulic System and 3 point linkage. By 1933 he built the Ferguson ‘Black’ prototype tractor in Belfast; the original is now in the Science Museum in London. The Black tractor incorporated all his patents.

The David Brown Engineering Company of Huddersfield England, had made the differential gear and transmission for Ferguson. Between 1933 and 1938 Harry Ferguson co-founded with David Brown the Ferguson-Brown Co. to manufacture replicas of the prototype tractor.

The partnership was short-lived but around 1354 Ferguson-Brown model ‘A’ tractors equipped with the Ferguson hydraulic system were produced (see below). In 1938 in anticipation of a break with David Brown, Harry Ferguson set off with a model ‘A’ tractor for Dearborn Michigan.