Good morning.
It’s a partly sunny Saturday for Whitewater, with a high of thirty-one.
On this day in 1849, the John Froelich scarcely known but yet a significant inventor, was born:
John Froelich, the inventor of the first internal-combustion traction motor, or tractor, is born on this day in Girard, Iowa.
At the end of the 19th century, Froelich operated a grain elevator and mobile threshing service: Every year at harvest time, he dragged a crew of hired hands and a heavy steam-powered thresher through Iowa and the Dakotas, threshing farmers’ crops for a fee. His machine was bulky, hard to transport and expensive to use, and it was also dangerous: One spark from the boiler on a windy day could set the whole prairie afire. So, in 1890, Froelich decided to try something new: Instead of that cumbersome, hazardous steam engine, he and his blacksmith mounted a one-cylinder gasoline engine on his steam engine’s running gear and set off for a nearby field to see if it worked.
It did: Froelich’s tractor chugged along safely at three miles per hour. But the real test came when Froelich and his team took their new machine out on their annual threshing tour, and it was a success there, too: Using just 26 gallons of gas, they threshed more than a thousand bushels of grain every day (72,000 bushels in all). What’s more, they did it without starting a single fire.
In 1894, Froelich and eight investors formed the Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company….
In 1918, the John Deere plow-manufacturing company bought Waterloo for $2,350,000.
In Wisconsin history, from 1959,
1959 – I-90 Opens to Traffic
On this date Interstate 90 opened to traffic between Janesville and Beloit. Work was temporarily halted north of Janesville as the exact route was not yet determined and property not yet acquired. [Source: Janesville Gazette November 24, 1959, p.1]
From Google’s daily puzzle, a question about music: “What was the original name of the first Motown act to win a Grammy?”