Crocodiles and Caterpillars,
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By "The Inspector."
Earlier in the year most of us who were not in the Army or in Our cradles spent our spare hours trying to persuade tin-can-encumbered patches of waste ground to assume some resemblance to ploughed acres. Boundless toil with unfamiliar implements worked wonders, and now we are, in allotment or in garden, busy. tracking the elusive , slug, the wily caterpillar, and hosts of other pests, to their lairs. personally am organizing ceaseless raids. upon cater pillar strongholds. I am constantly devising new lures, investing in fresh tins of lotion for the brutes. At the moment I am obsessed with caterpillars and their unpleasant habits. What more natural then than my title this week, or part of it at any rate.
The nomenclature of mechanical technics is a curious blending of shop patois and scientific philology. A moment's reflection recalls to mind numerous queer nicknames—they were originally nothing more—for tools, shop appliances and mechanical devices, and not a few of them are zoological in reference. There is the dog clutch, the monkey wrench, the clutch spider, the fly nut, the grasshopper, the worm wheel, the snail cam, the butterfly, the fish plate, the cod piece, the rat-tail file, and many another. But there are two of war prominence, the crocodile and the caterpillar, both promptly taken to heart by the slang-loving soldier. The crocodile is some sort of road carriage used as a trailer, I believe, for carting aircraft or similar bulky, light loads. I do not thiek I have seen one, but I surmise it has some sort of appearance suggestive of the powerful, low-lying ,inhabitant of the Nile and elsewhere. It is the caterpillar, particularly though, of which I would write at present, the type that is howitzer hauling nowadays and that may do its share of food production at a later date, unlike • its live relation who devotes his whole time to destroying it.
I wonder if I shall be the recipient of a friendly letter of protest from the genial London representative of the Holt Caterpillar Tractor interests, Mr. Feeney, for making free with the zoological title of his perambulating specialities. Caterpillar Tractors, Ltd., is, I am given to understand, very jealous of the use of the word " caterpillar " in any connection with endless-track motor vehicle propulsion or haulage. The American Holt Co. appears to have registered a:claim to property in the title, though with what particular right I am at a loss to record.
If I am not very much at fault in my memory, the first practical chain-track tractor, at any rate in this country, was that produced by Richard Hornsby's, of Grantharn, designed by Mr. David Roberts, the company's managing director. Whether there was an American ancestor I am unaware. I rather think there was not. The Grantham machine was produced somewhere about 190'7, a year after the great Roundthe-Country Trials. I have not rny bound volumes of THE COMMEROTAL MOTOR by me, but I distinctly recall the title affixed therein to a picture of that ugly duckling. The Editor apparently permitted it. to be christened "An Inventor's Nightmare." I was told at the time that Hornsby's were rather cross, but they can afford to smile at that early .description.
Hornsby's machine was stationed for a long -while at the M.T. headquarters at Aldershot, and amongst the troops there it received all kinds of opprobious names, not all of them polite, but amongst these myself heard it called "that adientived caterpillar."
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The nickname was apt, like 60 many of Tommy's other quick-witted descriptions. And they will be caterpillars to most of us, whatever the rights and wrongs of property in the title. We shall never call thern.Multipedes, good as that Ministry paraphrase is. _Nor will the American ' chain-track " or " creeper " catch on. As " The Engineer," writing on the same subject a while ago pointed out, the euphony and aptness combined of a good description will often lift it right away from its original object.
The title " Caterpillar,'" though picturesque, is not entirely appropriate. No tractor that I know of humps up in the middle quite in the true caterpillar style. The famous Grantham" Nightmare" cavorted like nothing so much as a sea-sick duck, if the latter indeed be a possibility. Hornsby's infant and the converted Mercedes, its successor, 'which made even a more colossal row, were the ancestors of our own Tank and of the Holt. A sort of cousin, of course, was the pedrail, also zoologically inclined, for Diplock's device has most ingenious and complicated elephant feet, but it was no chain-track machine.
This self-tracking method of propulsion has, like so many other navel productions, achieved notoriety because of the war's opportunities. We would have heard little here, I believe, of the caterpillar but for the war. A Holt was here before the fateful August 1914; it pirouetted and ploughed on the Sussex downs. Someone from THE COMMERCIAL MOTOR tested it and wrote enthusiastically of it thereafter, I recall ; its cost, however, was altogether beyond the capacity of the average farmer, and it is questionable if corresponding advantages accrued from its terpsi
chorean capacity fairy-like tread.
When the M.T., A.S.C. comes home we shall know just the relative values for all extraordinary purposes of the four-wheel-drive chassis and of the caterpillar, for there are bolts and copies of bolts out there galore. Personally I think the four-wheel-drive bids fair to have the greater application commercially. The caterpillar may find a number of special applications where roads are nil and weights are heavy. But for many a heavy-haulage problem, where adhesion is difficult and where manceuvring capacity is restricted, the principles so handsomely initiated by Panhard, Schneider, Renault, and oneor two other great French factories, to say nothing of the Yankee F.W.D., may have far-reaching results. • As to future application for the caterpillar or the Multipecle, or whatever you call it, did not Captain Scott take something of the sort out from the Wolseley works to help him across the Antarctic ice— caterpillars on skates, surely. That is Some indication of the possibility of its employment for unusual service. But it will take a very great deal to oust that revolutionary, albeit ancient, invention, the wheel, for most purposes.
The chain-track idea may yet prove useful on a eominercial scale, where the making and maintaining of roads proves impracticable. Where operation on virgin land is concerned, it needs little imagination to prophesy with confidence its further successful application. May this be the last tune it is used for war in my lifetime, at any rate. In peace conditions, sad, as a potato grower, I feel to record it, I must state my conviction that the caterpillar has "come to stay," though his functions bid fair to be strictly limited. Of the crocodile I know insufficient to prophesy