the Industrial Revolution developed, a proliferation of cultivator designs proceeded. These new cultivators were drawn by draft animals (such as horses, mules, or oxen) or were pushed or drawn by people, depending on the need and expense. The powered rotary hoe was invented by Arthur Clifford Howard who, in 1912, began experimenting with rotary tillage on his father's farm at Gilgandra, New South Wales, Australia. Initially using his father's steam tractor engine as a power source, he found that ground could be mechanically tilled without soil-packing occurring, as was the case with normal ploughing. His earliest designs threw the tilled soil sideways, until he improved his invention by designing an L-shaped blade mounted on widely spaced flanges fixed to a small-diameter rotor. With fellow apprentice Everard McCleary, he established a company to make his machine, but plans were interrupted by World War I. In 1919 Howard returned to Australia and resumed his design work, patenting a design with 5 rotary hoe cultivator blades and an internal combustion engine in 1920. In March 1922, Howard formed the company Austral Auto Cultivators Pty Ltd, which later became known as Howard Auto Cultivators. It was based in Northmead, a suburb of Sydney, from 1927. Meanwhile, in North America during the 1910s, tractors were evolving away from traction engine–sized monsters toward smaller, lighter, more affordable machines. The Fordson tractor especially had made tractors affordable and practical for small and medium family farms for the first time in history. Cultivating was somewhat of an afterthought in the Fordson's design, which reflected the fact that even just bringing practical motorized tractive power alone to this market segment was in itself a milestone. This left an opportunity for others to pursue better motorized cultivating. Between 1915 and 1920, various inventors and farm implement companies experimented with a class of machines referred to as motor cultivators, which were simply modified horse-drawn shank-type cultivators with motors added for self-propulsion. This class of machines found limited market success. But by 1921 International Harvester had combined motorized cultivating with the other tasks of tractors (tractive power and belt work) to create the Farmall, the general-purpose tractor tailored to cultivating that basically invented the category of row-crop tractors. In Australia, by the 1930s, Howard was finding it increasingly difficult to meet a growing worldwide demand for exports of his machines. He travelled to the United Kingdom, founding the company Rotary Hoes Ltd