Retrotechtacular: The Ferguson System
Of the many great technological leaps made in the middle of the 20th century, one of the ones with perhaps the greatest impact on our modern life takes a back seat behind the more glamorous worlds of electronics, aeronautics, or computing. But the ancestor of the modern tractor has arguably had more of an impact on the human condition in 2025 than that of the modern computer, and if you’d been down on the farm in the 1940s you might have seen one.
The Ferguson system refers to the three-point implement linkage you’ll find on all modern tractors, the brainchild of the Irish engineer Harry Ferguson. The film below the break is a marketing production for American farmers, and it features the Ford-built American version of the tractor known to Brits and Europeans as the Ferguson TE20.
As the four-wheeled machines grew in size and their implements moved beyond the size of their horse-drawn originals, they started to encounter a new set of problems which the film below demonstrates in detail. In short, a plough simply dragged by a tractor exerts a turning force on the machine, giving the front a tendency to lift and the rear a lack of traction. The farmers of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to counter this by loading their tractors with extra weights, at the expense of encumbering them and compromising their usefulness. Ferguson solved this problem by rigidly attaching the plough to the tractor through his three-point linkage while still allowing for flexibility in its height. The film demonstrates this in great detail, showing the hydraulic control and the feedback provided through a valve connected to the centre linkage spring.
A modern tractor is invariably much larger than the TE20, will have all-wheel drive, a wider-spaced three-point linkage for much larger implements, and a much more sophisticated transmission. But the principle is exactly the same, and in use it provides an identical level of utility to the original. While the TE20 is most likely to appear in over-restored-form at a tractor show in 2025 running on an odd mix of paraffin and petrol they can still sometimes be found at work, and albeit a few decades ago now I’ve even taken a turn on one myself. What struck me at the time was how small a machine it is compared to the heavyweight drawbar tractors it replaced; the effect of the three point linkage on ground pressure was such that it simply didn’t need the extra size. It’s equivalent to what we today would refer to as a yard tractor or an orchard tractor, the last one I drove being used for ground maintenance at a sports pitch. I have to admit that if I saw one in need of TLC at the right price I’d be sorely tempted.
So next time you see a tractor, take a look at its three-point linkage and think for a moment of those 1940s machines it’s derived from. It’s likely almost everything you eat has at some point been touched by that piece of machinery.
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