Eugenio Beltrami
A great implication that the tractrix had was the study of its surface of revolution about its asymptote: the pseudosphere. Studied by Eugenio Beltrami in 1868, as a surface of constant negative Gaussian curvature, the pseudosphere is a local model of hyperbolic geometry. The idea was carried further by Kasner and Newman in their book "Mathematics and the Imagination", where they show a toy train dragging a pocket watch to generate the tractrix.