New Britain herald., 1916-09-19

TRACTORS FOR NEW
 TANKS MADE HERE
Peoria Manufacturer Said He Sold
 1000 to England

Washington, Sept. 19.-The British tanks" the armored motor cars used in recent assaults on German trenches in northern France so successfully as to attract worldwide attention, were
 built for the most part in Peoria, Ill.,, in the form of caterpillar tractors de- signed many years before the war be- gan for the purpose of meeting some
 of the difficult problems of modern
 farming Except for their arm0r, their machine guns and their crews, thousands like them are in use today in the United States, in blowing, dig
 ging ditches, and other labors less heroic than war.
 M M. Baker, vice president of the Holt Manufacturing Company, eX- plained here that it was machines made by his company at its Peoria plant that had hurdled German trenches walked through forests and crawled over shell craters in the face of intense gunfire.
 We have sold about 1, ,0OO caterpil- lar tractors to the British govern ment," said MT. Baker. I've have had nothing to do with putting armor on them, or placing machine guns, but some of our men at Aldershot, Eng, recently were notified that the British government intended to arm some of the tractors and use them for work other than the usual towing of big guns.
 Germany had some of these trac- tors before the war began, and al- though I do not understand just how it occurred, I believe she may have got others since then. We have sent some to France and some to Russia. So far as I know, up until the recent of the armored cars the tractors were used only to tow big guns. I understood that Germany used about forty of them in this work before Liege early in the war and recent photographs show that the British are using some of them now for the same purpose"
 MT. Baker said he did not know how many of the 1000 tractors sent to England had been armored and put in service as land battleships, nor did he know what equipment the Brit ish war office had placed upon cars to be used in this work
 'It is true,' said MT. Baker. that these tractors can go ahead over al- lIlooI dl1S Ill1hS UT I1lI OuSl dl1IOSL ally thing. They can straddle a trench, go through a swamp roll over logs, Or climb through craters like ground juggernaut. It looks uncanny to see them crawl along the ground just like a huge caterpillar. In a thick forest, if they encounter trees they could not brush out of their way they could easily be used to uproot hem and clear their own paths."
 MT. Baker said the tractors sent 10 England weigh about 1S 900 pounds | each, develop 12O-horse power and l are built of steel. The caterpillar fea- ture, he explained is of the utmos Speaking broadly, the tractor crawls on two belts, with cor- rugated surfaces on either side of the body. The corrugated surface is on the ground. On the inside of the 1 belts on each side of the body, are two lines of steel rails, making four lines In a11.. These rails are in short sections jointed and operate over a cogged mechanism that actually lays tn em down with their belt attachment as the tractor moves ahead and picks them up again, so that the car runs on it's own self-made track continu- ously. The short joints in the rails make it easy to turn to right or left