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The first steam-powered traction engines were built around 1850, but these were more closely related to rail locomotives than tractors as we know them. They were huge, cast iron behemoths that were used pretty much only for plowing or threshing due to their size and weight. In 1892, John Froelich built the first gasoline/petrol-powered tractor in the US, although it wasn't called a tractor, and his company, the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company, went broke in a very short time. The first commercially successful tractors in the US were built by the Hart-Parr Company of Charles City, Iowa in 1903. They were the ones who coined the term "tractor", which was short for "traction" and "power".

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13y ago

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