TRACTOR TRIVIA and other interesting stuff 1/21/2024

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Dent Parrett is not a household name but he improved the entire tractor industry

 

While still in high school Dent Parrett began working with farm implements for Harry Van Horn, who had a implement store in Wenona Illinois. Van Horn let young Parrett repair and maintain the steam threshing machines he owned. A couple of Van Horn’s customers even had steam-plowing engines, and occasionally Parrett would get to work on them.

In 1908, after spending a year at the University of Illinois, Parrett opened his own machine shop in Wenona. Parrett had been intrigued with the possibilities of a

lightweight, maneuverable tractor for farm use in place of the clumsy steam-powered engines. In his machine shop, he began experimenting with a new tractor design. In

his own words, ‘I hired a young engineer from the University of Illinois to work out the design details for the first tractor I built. This engineer was a junior and worked during his summer vacation to design the tractor; it was finished about the time he returned to school for the fall term.’

The first Parrett tractor was finished in time to help with the fall plowing in 1912. Encouraged by its success and the interest it stimulated, he organized the Parrett Tractor Company in 1913 at Ottawa, Illinois. Some thirty tractors were built there between 1913 and 1915. In 1915 the company was moved to Chicago Heights, Illinois, where over 300 tractors were built the first year, twice that number the next year.

Massey-Harris Limited of Toronto, in 1916 already prominent in the farm implement field, was eager to add a tractor to its line. In 1917 an agreement was reached whereby Massey-Harris would build a tractor from Parrett’s specifications and drawings.

Other companies, too, copied Parrett’s tractor so meticulously that some of the parts were interchangeable with those of the Parrett tractor.

To prove how reliable the Parrett tractor was, Dent Parrett put on a 100-hour non-stop demonstration near Salina, Kansas, during one of the national tractor demonstrations. Parrett’s machine pulled binders in the wheat field. It thoroughly demonstrated that while the Parrett tractor could operate non-stop, the then-current horse drawn binders with tractor hitches couldn’t and went to pieces like wooden bridges under the big steam rig.

Parrett was the first to solve the dust hazard for gasoline-driven farm equipment, when he came up with a water filter cleaner, which was later standard equipment on farm machinery. In 1918, Parrett was commissioned a captain in the ordnance reserve corps, in charge of engineering production and inspection of engines and artillery tractors built by Holt Manufacturing Co. of Peoria, Illinois, which after the war became Caterpillar.

By 1919 there were about 200 firms trying to get rich making tractors, and with Dent Parrett having to pay almost as much for an engine as Henry Ford got for his whole tractor, Parrett sold off his enterprise and took to designing for other folks.

Massey-Harris hired Parrett in 1920 to design a larger tractor than the earlier model and to supervise the building of experimental tractors from his new designs. From 1920 to 1923 he was chief of experimental design at Massey-Harris.

In 1923 he designed a light-cultivating tractor, later produced by Continental Cultor of Springfield, Ohio. Parrett used a Ford engine in this tractor… and became a close friend of another imaginative pioneer in the automotive field, Henry Ford. This light tractor sold as part of a complete cultivating unit. One model pulled a single-row cultivator with the operator in the cultivator seat guiding the tractor. Another model had the cultivator mounted on the tractor. Several thousand of these cultivating units were sold. He also designed, for Continental, a mounted corn picker the first quickly mountable picker ever produced commercially.

 

In 1931 a tractor he produced for Sears Roebuck went out to the Nebraska Tractor Testing facility and pulled (on steel wheels, of course) within 10 pounds of the operating weight of the tractor plus, the operator, oil, water, lugs and all. It was a world’s record that has never been beaten or equaled.

The Parrett-designed rubber-tired tractor hit the market about the same time in 1932 as one built by Allis Chalmers with Firestone tires. Records aren’t clear on which tractor can claim the honor of being first, but it was obviously a pretty close race.

Parrett in 1938 became associated with Auto Specialties Manufacturing Co. in St. Joseph, Michigan, to work out an adaptation of a disc brake for tractors. Evolving out of this assignment was the Parrett-designed double-disc brake now standard on about half of the wheel-type farm tractors built in this country.

In 1946, also for Auto Specialties, he developed a high-capacity clutch that could interrupt the power to the final drive pinion to give the tractor live power take-off. With very little basic change in tractor design, thousands of these clutches are in use today.

Parrett had enough patents to wallpaper his home on Lake Michigan, though he didn't actually do that.

 Also added to the list of achievements must be an item to cover the inspired leadership Parrett has given to two young engineers fortunate enough to work with him. One of these went on to become chief engineer at Ford Motor Co. and another became chief engineer with Allis Chalmers Manufacturing Co.

He was the recipient of the Cyrus Hall McCormick Gold Medal from the ASAE for his work on the Lambert disc brakes and his high-capacity clutch.

[ebinmaine 70,698]

Quite the story!