animal labour as the motive power. As his interest in automobiles grew, he also expressed a desire to "lift the burden of farming from flesh and blood and place it on steel and motors." In the early 20th century, he began to build experimental tractors from automobile components. Four years after founding the Ford Motor Company in 1903, Ford finished his first experimental tractor in 1907 on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, referring to it as the "Automobile Plow". Approximately 600 gasoline-powered tractors were in use on American farms in 1908. Fordson tractor design was headed by Eugene Farkas and József Galamb, both involved in the design of the successful Ford Model T automobile. Traction engines had been around for a while, but they were large, heavy, expensive machines suited to prairie grain farming more than to small family farms in other regions. In the early 1910s, North America and Europe were hungry for small, inexpensive tractors, and many people seized on the Model T as a platform with which to create them. Clearly the idea of an auto-like tractor, made using auto-like parts and methods or by conversion from autos, was ripe. American engineer, inventor, and businessman Henry Ford built experimental tractors from automobile components during the early 20th century, and launched a prototype known as the Model B in August 1915. Further prototypes, with a dedicated tractor design, followed in 1916. With World War I raging in Europe, the first regular-production Henry Ford & Son tractors were exported to the U.K. in 1917 to expand British agriculture. In 1918, exports continued, the tractors began to be labeled as Fordsons, and U.S. domestic sales began. Sales boomed in 1918 and 1919. Henry Ford experimented with both auto-plows and heavier tractors. In August 1915, at a plowing demonstration in Fremont, Nebraska, he introduced a newly designed tractor known as the Model B. It used a 16 horsepower, two-cylinder, horizontally opposed engine, a spur gear transmission and three wheels - two front drivers and one rear steerer. The Model B was never produced, but did gain enough publicity to let the world know Ford was interested in developing a tractor. Knowing there was demand for a Ford-built tractor, a group of entrepreneurs in Minneapolis organized The Ford Tractor Company, paying a company clerk surnamed Ford for the use of his name, with the intention of getting sales and attention from the confusion