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Tractor Pioneer: The Life of Harry Ferguson. By Colin Fraser. Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 1973. Pp. vii + 294. Illus. $10.00.

Harry Ferguson's career proves that an individual, starting from scratch, without family influence or connections, can make an enormous difference in the world. Ferguson (1884-1960), not related to this reviewer, had a vision, supported by rare ability and persistence, that put on small farms a million tractors, more or less, designed not to compete with other tractors but to replace horses. I should guess that a majority of his customers did not recognize their need for a tractor until they had witnessed one or more of the numerous Ferguson demonstrations. Colin Fraser, author of this well-written biography of a not very attractive person, never met Ferguson, but he knew his machines very well. "My interest in Harry Ferguson," Fraser wrote, "stems from a period of about five years that I spent as an instructor lecturing and giving courses on farm machinery bearing his name — machinery so excellent that it aroused in me a profound admiration" (2). Fraser mastered Ferguson's voluminous personal papers and interviewed sixty-two people who knew Ferguson, traveling in England, Ireland, the United States, and Canada to do so. The portrait would have contained fewer warts in the absence of the interviews: some aspects of Ferguson's personality, such as the fastidiousness that expressed itself as he straightened the ties of his senior executives or lectured subordinates on punctuality or on keeping notebook and pencil in separate pockets for efficient retrieval, would be unlikely to be recoverable in his files. Apparently, Ferguson could offset his crankiness by an attractive manner. The head of British Motors Corporation once told Ferguson, "Personally you are a charming fellow but you do write some rubbish, don't you, and I'm getting tired of reading it" (264). His rubbish included complaints about those who in his view took advantage of him; in his later years it comprised a simplistic social gospel of reducing inflation by enhancing agricultural prosperity — through mechanization, of course. "I spent several wonderful years with Mr. Ford," Ferguson recalled of his association with the elder Henry Ford during the World War II years, "discussing the improvement of the world by eliminating draught-animals on the farm" (142). Born in 1884 on a farm near Belfast in Northern Ireland, fourth of eleven children, Ferguson loathed the farm work he had to do as a boy. He disliked horses, remembering all his life, for example, an occasion when he had unexpectedly to unhitch, rub down, and water a horse after returning home from market with his father. As soon as he could, he left the farm; at eighteen, he was about to emigrate to Canada when his elder brother, who had established a cycle repair shop in Belfast a year earlier, took Harry on as an apprentice. Harry raced motorcycles from 1904; in 1910, in a monoplane he built, he demonstrated his wide streak of dogged persistence as he spent months making hundreds of abortive