Going back 90 years... Diesel Progress July 1943

The Chilean Navy Auxiliary training vessel, Lautaro, got the cover of this wartime issue of Diesel Progress. The ship was powered by two Atlas Imperial diesel main engines and two Reiner diesel generating units.

Starting with the May 1935 issue, Diesel Progress – or Power Progress as it’s known today – has covered engines and engine-powered equipment. Through those nine decades, the writers and editors of this publication have witnessed the adoption of technology that was considered science fiction in the 1930s and they’ve praised (as proper non-biased journalists) the entrepreneurs, executives and especially the engineers that made that progress possible. It’s been – and it continues to be — an amazing thing to watch. Throughout 2025, we will be celebrating those 90 years. With this department, we’re going back to some of the unique applications, forgotten firms and the companies that have been part of the industry and this media company since the beginning of both.

Farming with tractors

Another year of war will put the U.S. on food rations for about everything but bread, say the authorities. A quarter century ago in World War I, bread got a doctoring up with wheat substitutes to stretch it. But this time “something has been added” to the farming system that produces the wheat, oats, rye and barley. That something is the diesel and the cutting in half of the cost of such farming fundamentals as plowing, disking, harrowing, seeding, trucking, harvesting and lighting.

Proof? The data from such areas and sources as the Farm Bureau County Agents and tractor dealers up and down the Pacific Coast from the hills of the famous Palouse in eastern Washington to the Mexican border. Your Old Reporter ran into this startling revolutionary economic fact upon his return to the Pacific Coast in 1934 when diesel tractors were just starting to roll as farmers bought them as fast as the manufacturers could make them as they discovered the magic problems in arithmetic they did as they divided, subtracted, multiplied and added the items of fuel volume and cost, work and crops to put the farmer and rancher using them back on the profit side after his years of losses using antiquated equipment.

A Caterpillar tractor and combine are shown harvesting wheat in the Palouse region of eastern Washington. F. Hal Higgins, the “Old Reporter” in this article, wrote this and many others for Diesel Progress. Born in Iowa in 1886, he eventually moved to California. He was news editor for Caterpillar between 1927-’33, and when the company moved its headquarters out of San Leandro, Calif., he became a freelance writer. In 1927, he began collecting books, brochures and photos that related to the off-highway equipment industry, especially ag tractors and combines. The University of California, Davis Library acquired Higgins’ massive collection in 1959. The university’s Dept. of Archives Special Collections maintains it to this day. Countless articles and books about the history of the industry have been made complete because of the resources Higgins preserved.

Queer part of the story was that competitors in the tractor business who had no diesel units to sell were the first to discover what was happening and dramatize it in a simple statement: “The arrival of the diesel tractor in big farming operations in the West has cut the fundamental farming costs of plowing, seedbed preparation and harvesting in half.” Oliver Farm Equipment Co.’s Brand Manager Putnam gave this startling summary of the revolution just getting under way. Your Old Reporter found he had crystallized the facts in his sentence by a check-up with county agents, dealers, university engineers and economists from Canada to the Mexican border and over to Arizona. They cited custom tractor rates as then being quoted by diesel tractor owners compared to pre-diesel rates to prove it: plowing down from $3 an acre to $1.50, and all of the many other operations cut as deeply.

That explains why International Harvester Co. quickly followed Caterpillar with a series of diesel tractors, as did Allis-Chalmers, which really led all companies with its Atlas diesel-engined [Monarch] tractor shown at the 1928 California State Fair.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Power Progress.