A Brief history of John Fowler and the A7 Traction Engine
Taken from the book "Building a Fowler Traction Engine in 3" Scale" by MJ Engineering, Ringwood, England.
Historically,
John Fowler was one of the young men who seized upon steam with the creative
zest and resource which was characteristic of his age. Fowler was born in
Wiltshire in 1826, the third son of a wealthy Quaker merchant, and he might well
have lived longer and more comfortably had he followed the business of a corn
merchant to which his father had articled him. Until he came of age he dutifully
followed this calling, gaining valuable experience in farming methods which was
to be particularly useful later on when he went on to become a pioneer of
mechanized agriculture.
In
1847 he joined a Middlesborough engineering firm manufacturing such items as
locomotives and Colliery Winding Equipment. Again he could have made a good
professional living by staying put. However, a visit on the firms business, to
Ireland, aroused his Quaker conscience and changed his life. He witnessed the
famine which followed the failure of two years of potato crops. He returned to
England and gave up his job, determined to mechanise land drainage by the use of
steam. The result was his Mole Drainage Plough shown at the great exhibition of
1851, and built for him by Ransomes. In 1858 Fowler was awarded the £500 prize
offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England for his balance plough. He
was said to have spent ten times the amount of the award in experiment to
produce it. Sets of ploughing tackle were built for him by several contractors
until he set up on his own in the 1860’s in Leeds.
Although
he made his name for ploughing, following his untimely death in 1864 in a
hunting accident, natural evolution determined that the company would seek other
uses for steam traction. As roads improved, self moving engines were developed
and the traction engine as we know it was born. Apart from road haulage, and
timber work, the foremost employment of the traction engine was threshing. The
characteristic engine of the early years of threshing was 8 nhp, single or
double cylindered, according to ones preference. As boiler pressures increased,
the 7 nhp engine became popular. Big enough to be capable, but not so big as to
be awkward in the average stockyard.
Singles
predominated in threshing, compounds cost more initially, and did not govern so
well at lower pressures. A single would run quite nicely at 80 or 90 lbs
pressure, but a compound was out of the question at less than 140 lbs. This
difference in terms of steam raising time meant another twenty minutes or so to
get to the higher pressure, apart from the additional oiling and cleaning time
required.
So
the seven horsepower engine became a very convenient all purpose engine, a
foot or so shorter than an eight horse power machine, and good for threshing and
chaff cutting simultaneously. A foot in length sounds a trivial thing, but in
fact it could often make all the difference between being able to set up in a
yard or not.