Working machines are judged on whether the job got done, so their history is full of plain, stubborn people: a blacksmith building a boat trailer, a hospital patient carving a bulldog out of soap, a woman who answered a licensing board by handing over her driving record. These thirty-six stories run from the first truck ever sold to the largest machine that moves under its own power.
Every tile in a Trucks and Tractors game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Gottlieb Daimler's 1896 machine looked like a wagon that had lost its horses, and its engine sat at the very back, driving the rear axle by belt. The two-cylinder Phoenix, borrowed from a car, made four horsepower out of just over a liter. Before it went on sale, Daimler had it hauling loads at a brick factory in Heidenheim for months. The first buyer was not German: the very first truck went to England.
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Ford's light-duty pickup arrived in April 1925 as a Model T runabout with a steel bed bolted on at the factory: fifty-six inches long, forty and three-quarters wide, with an adjustable tailgate and four pockets for stakes. It cost $281, and nearly thirty-three thousand eight hundred sold in the first year. The photograph of one in Ford's own archive is dated December 1924, taken months before the truck reached a showroom.
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In 1914 a Detroit lumber dealer named Frederic Sibley wanted to haul his sailboat to his summer home behind a modified Ford Model T. He took the problem to a nearby blacksmith, August Fruehauf, who built him a trailer with no front wheels that attached directly to the car. Sibley then had Fruehauf rebuild it to carry lumber, and ordered more. Fruehauf called the thing a semi-trailer, and The Henry Ford, which keeps it, calls it the ancestor of America's freight trailers.
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Mack did not choose the bulldog. In 1917 the British government bought Mack AC trucks to carry troops, food and equipment to its front lines, and the soldiers who drove them found that the blunt-nosed hood and the truck's stubborn durability called to mind their country's mascot. They called it the Bulldog Mack. The company adopted the name the soldiers had given it, and the bulldog became its trademark.
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Edgar Worthington and Harry Kent ran a small Seattle truck shop called Gersix, which had built fifty-three trucks in 1922. When they incorporated in January 1923 they needed a name, so they took their own: Kent and Worthington. Kenworth turned out seventy-eight gasoline trucks in its first year, aimed squarely at Pacific Northwest loggers who needed something that could carry a heavy load down a narrow muddy road without falling apart.
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Dodge spent the war building four-wheel-drive WC trucks for the army. In 1946 it bolted a civilian cab onto essentially the same chassis and sold it as the Power Wagon. Power take-off units front and rear let it run a winch, a post-hole digger or farm implements, so it worked rather like a tractor that could also drive to town. Ford would not sell a factory four-wheel-drive pickup of its own until 1959.
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On February 18, 2006, near Clifton in Queensland, a single Mack Titan prime mover driven by John Atkinson hooked up one hundred and thirteen trailers and pulled the whole assembly about four hundred and ninety feet. Stretched out it measured 4,836 feet and 11 inches, nine-tenths of a mile, and Guinness World Records still lists it as the longest road train. Guinness puts that length at 156 London buses, end to end.
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The Postal Service did not name its next van for style. In April 1986 it ordered 99,150 Long Life Vehicles for $1.1 billion, with the body expected to last twenty-four years and the powertrain twelve. The Allied division of Grumman built them in a rural Pennsylvania township, where the plant's workforce was set to grow from 250 people to 600. The first ones came off the line in April 1987.
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Ford's F-Series has been the best-selling truck in the United States every year since 1977, a run of forty-nine straight years, and the best-selling vehicle of any kind for forty-four of them. More than thirty-four million have been sold since the streak began, and the line topped eight hundred thousand sales in 2025. A streak that long usually belongs to a ballplayer. This one belongs to a work truck.
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In 1892 John Froelich and his blacksmith, Will Mann, bolted a one-cylinder gasoline engine onto the running gear of a steam traction engine and added gearing of their own. What made it matter was that the machine could be driven forward and backward. That fall it ran a threshing crew through 72,000 bushels of small grain. The company it started became the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company, which Deere and Company bought in March 1918 for $2,350,000.
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Charles Hart and Charles Parr met in 1892 as mechanical engineering students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. For extra credit they built internal-combustion engines, five of them, and graduated with honors. Stationary engines paid the bills at first, and in 1901 they moved to Charles City, Iowa, to build farm tractors only. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers marks their Model 3 of 1903 as a historic engineering landmark and calls it the first commercially successful farm tractor in the world powered by an internal-combustion engine.
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Britain was short of food in 1917, with men and horses gone to the war, and its Ministry of Munitions asked Henry Ford for tractors. Agreement was reached that June: six thousand assembled machines and another thousand in parts. The first tractor was finished in October and shipped on the sixth of that month, and the whole order was delivered by April 1918. They were built not by Ford Motor Company but by a separate firm, Henry Ford and Son.
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Plowing was the easy part. What kept horses on American farms into the 1920s was cultivating: getting through a standing crop without trampling it. International Harvester's Farmall, released in 1924, set two narrow front wheels close together so they ran between the rows, and lifted the rear axle high enough to pass over the plants. It was the first commercially successful row-crop tractor, and when a bigger model arrived in 1931 the original was renamed the Farmall Regular.
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Harry Ferguson's 1925 patent had a plain title: apparatus for coupling agricultural implements to tractors and automatically regulating the depth of work. What it did was make the tractor and the implement behave as one machine instead of two. In October 1938 he demonstrated it to Henry Ford, and the two settled their deal with a handshake and no paperwork. Ford's grandson ended the arrangement in 1947 and kept using the hitch. The suit settled in 1952 for about nine million dollars.
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Steel lugs shook a tractor, chewed the soil and broke up new pavement, and many states passed laws that kept them off the roads. After a public test on Labor Day 1932, Allis-Chalmers announced that October that Firestone air tires would be standard equipment on its Model U, the first tractor builder to offer them that way. Farmers were slow to believe it. Rubber was on 14 percent of new wheel tractors in 1935, 43 percent by 1937, and 95 percent by 1940.
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To convince farmers that air tires were not a gimmick, Allis-Chalmers and Firestone put tractors on racetracks. Through the summer of 1933 they staged tractor races at seven state fairs in the Midwest and at the Milwaukee Speedway. Barney Oldfield, the best-known American race driver of the day, ran a Model U at better than forty miles an hour. Another of their drivers, Ab Jenkins, took a modified Model U to the Bonneville Salt Flats in June 1935 and reached 67 miles an hour. Nobody farms at that speed, which was rather the point.
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Minneapolis-Moline's UDLX came with an enclosed cab, upholstered seats, adjustable windows, a spotlight, a heater, a radio, a brake light and a cigarette lighter, plus an overdrive that let it run about forty miles an hour on the highway. One machine for the field and the trip to town. Accounts put the list price between about $1,900 and $2,200, well above a plain tractor, and the number built at 125 to 150. Its narrow wheelbase made it unsteady at speed, and in Canada safety inspectors had the overdrive taken out.
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Fritz Huber's design, shown in Germany in June 1921, had one cylinder, twelve horsepower, chain drive to the rear wheels and no gearbox at all. To start it the driver heated the hot bulb with a lamp until it glowed red, then pumped in fuel and turned the engine over at the flywheel. In return for that trouble, a Bulldog would burn almost anything liquid and combustible: fuel oil, waste oil, vegetable oil. The two hundred thousandth left Mannheim in 1956.
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Benjamin Holt's tracked steam tractor first crawled across a field on Thanksgiving Day, 1904. Some months later, during a test run, a photographer watching the track undulate between the drive sprocket and the front idler wheel remarked that the machine moved along like a caterpillar. Until then the crawlers had often been called mud turtles. The word stuck to the tractor and then to the company: the first Holt tractor to wear the Caterpillar badge came off the assembly line in 1909, and Holt registered the name as a trademark the year after.
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Holt Manufacturing and the C.L. Best Tractor Company were long-standing rivals in northern California. To survive a crowded market they agreed in 1925 to join forces as the Caterpillar Tractor Company. Holt was roughly twice the size and brought the bigger plants and the Caterpillar name; Best brought the better manufacturing methods. The man put in charge was Clarence Leo Best, who found himself running a company named for a word coined about his rival's machine. He stayed at the top of it until 1951.
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Caterpillar equipment used to be gray with red trim. On December 7, 1931, that ended. The company had gone looking for a color that could be seen from the greatest possible distance by day and by night while still being easy on the eye, and tested three candidates: a shady yellow, a flash red and a white. Hi-Way Yellow won, and a machine you cannot miss became the industry's idea of normal.
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William Smith Otis built his first digging machine at twenty-two and patented an improved design in 1839. It swung a bucket on a boom and did by steam what a crew had done by hand, and the equipment industry now calls it the grandfather of all construction machines: it had every basic element of a modern cable shovel except the ability to turn a full circle. Otis died of typhus fever later that same year, aged twenty-six.
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The Culebra Cut was the hard part of the Panama Canal, a channel blasted and dug straight through the continental divide. The French started in 1881 and moved almost nineteen million cubic yards. The Americans took over in 1904 and moved more than a hundred million. On May 20, 1913, steam shovels numbered 222 and 230, working toward each other from opposite ends, met at the bottom of the cut. The canal opened fifteen months later.
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Clark Equipment built the Tructractor in 1917 to move axles, drills and wheels between departments of its own plant in Buchanan, Michigan. It was the world's first internal-combustion industrial truck, and it had no forks: just a flat bed that workers loaded and unloaded by hand. Its usefulness was obvious enough to put it on sale. Eight were built in 1918 and more than seventy-five in 1919, and by 1922 Clark had a lift truck that raised its load with hydraulics.
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Joseph Cyril Bamford took a prototype excavator arm worked by hydraulic rams and hung it on the back of a machine that already carried a loading shovel on the front. The result could dig a trench and then fill it in without anyone swapping tools. The Mk 1 left the line at Rocester, Staffordshire, in 1953, and JCB calls it the world's first backhoe loader, though Wain-Roy of Massachusetts had sold an all-hydraulic backhoe on a Ford tractor five years earlier. The shape held: JCB built its millionth backhoe loader in January 2025.
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Bucyrus-Erie built one machine like Big Muskie. It weighed about 13,500 short tons and swung a 220-cubic-yard bucket on a 310-foot boom, and it did not roll on wheels or tracks: it walked, lifting its whole tub and shifting itself along a step at a time. Too big to ship, it was erected at the mine from pieces hauled in by more than 300 railcars and 250 trucks. It stripped ground above an Ohio coal seam from 1969 until 1991, and the state's Department of Natural Resources calls it the largest dragline ever built.
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Bagger 293 is a bucket-wheel excavator built by MAN TAKRAF of Leipzig and working an open-cast coal mine in North Rhine-Westphalia. It weighs 14,196 metric tons, runs 722 feet from end to end and stands 310 feet at its highest point, and Guinness World Records lists it as the largest land vehicle. Eighteen buckets on a wheel at the front can shift 240,000 cubic meters of earth in a day.
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Before Frederick McKinley Jones, food moving by truck was kept cold with ice and salt. Jones built a mechanical refrigeration unit that could take the pounding of a road, and the patent he and his partner Joseph Numero filed in November 1939 was granted in 1942. Their company, Thermo King, supplied the military in the Second World War, cooling food, medicine and blood plasma. Jones earned more than sixty patents, and in 1991, thirty years after his death, he became the first Black American awarded the National Medal of Technology.
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The engine that hauls freight and pulls plows is often said to have been designed for vegetable oil. That gets the order backward. At the Paris exhibition of 1900 the Otto Company showed a small diesel running on peanut oil, at the request of a French government looking for fuel from its African colonies. Rudolf Diesel wrote that the engine "was constructed for using mineral oil, and was then worked on vegetable oil without any alterations being made," and that it ran so smoothly that only very few people were aware of it.
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Cast-iron plows were cumbersome on the prairie, where heavy black soil clung to the blade and had to be scraped clean again and again. John Deere, a blacksmith in Grand Detour, Illinois, cut a share from an old sawmill blade and shaped it by bending it over a log. Polished steel let the soil slide off. He was selling almost a thousand plows a year by 1846, and more than thirteen thousand a year by 1856.
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Cyrus McCormick's father had tried and failed to build a machine that would cut grain. In July 1831 the son succeeded, producing a reaper that carried every essential part the commercial machines would later have. He patented it in 1834, a year after a rival announced one of his own, began building them on the family estate in 1837, and licensed production around the country from 1843. The Chicago factory he built in 1847 grew into one of the greatest industrial establishments in the country.
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Joseph Cyril Bamford rented a lock-up garage twelve feet by fifteen in Uttoxeter, England, in 1945 and bought a second-hand welding set for one pound. Out of war-surplus material, including steel sheet that had been part of air-raid shelters, he built a tipping trailer. He sold it at a nearby market for forty-five pounds plus a part-exchanged farm cart, on the same day his son Anthony was born, and set about building another. The welding set and that first trailer have both been kept.
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Otto Zachow and his brother-in-law William Besserdich kept a machine shop in Clintonville, Wisconsin. The hard part of driving all four wheels is steering the two that pull. Their answer, patented in March 1908, was an axle that could be steered while power ran through it, with a universal joint at each end. The car they built around it that year was called the Battleship, and a Wisconsin historical marker says it could go anywhere a team of horses could go. Government interest and early military tests then turned the company from cars to trucks.
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In Chattanooga in 1916, Ernest Holmes Sr. installed a hand-cranked rigging system on the rear frame of a 1913 Cadillac sedan and built the first tow truck. The story goes that the idea came to him after he was one of a crew of men who spent hours hauling a Model T out of South Chickamauga Creek; his hometown paper reports that part as legend. What is on record is the machine, the patent he filed in 1917, and the company he founded in Chattanooga that began building tow trucks in 1919. His design grew into what the trade calls the split-boom wrecker.
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Mack trucks had been called Bulldogs since the First World War. In 1932 Alfred F. Masury, a chief engineer at Mack, was in the hospital for surgery, and he passed the time carving a bulldog out of a bar of soap. The patent application for the radiator ornament was filed that July and granted in October. The dog he whittled while recovering has stood on the hoods of Mack trucks, little changed, ever since.
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The man whose hitch sits under nearly every tractor made his name in the air first. Harry Ferguson built a monoplane with an engine of thirty to thirty-five horsepower, wings of American elm and covering cloth from the Dunlop Rubber Company. On the last day of 1909, at Hillsborough Demesne in County Down, he flew it a hundred and thirty yards at a height of about fifteen feet, the first man in Ireland to design, build and fly his own aircraft.
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