Many people do not know that the “chain track” was invented in England. The Caterpillar company which was a combo of the Holt and Best tractor companies did not invent the technology but they did help to advance it. The “chain track” was first executed by the R. Hornsby company of Grantham, England and in this video we see a couple of their earliest vehicles being tested over a variety of surfaces and places. We’ve told you about the Hornsby steam crawler before but the cool thing here is the fact that this is video of them actually working.
The first vehicle we see and the one we see the most of has the appearances of a car that’s rolling on tracks. It is shown with two guys cruising in it, pulling a trailer, and climbing over all manner of things. Hornsby first concentrated on oil powered machines and later graduated to massive steam powered units. The company would be belly up about six years after this video was made and eventually they sold the rights to the track system that they developed to Caterpillar and the rest is history.
This looks like it was a very robust and capable vehicle for the time. One of the things Hornsby had kind of banked on was the fact that the British Army would want a bunch of these babies. Unfortunately for him, despite the fact that his vehicles always kicked ass in trials, the guys who were in charge of approving and buying such equipment were cavalry minded and did not want to lose the tradition of horse mounted fighters. Ironically, Caterpillar crawlers would be ordered by the dozen when WWI got nasty and mechanized equipment became an integral and wholly necessary part of any army.
The end of this video is cool when the guys are spinning donuts the tractor to illustrate its zero turning radius ability.
