How Just One Mistake Destroyed America's Tractor Giant

Read the first chapter of How Britain Stopped Making Things free: https://mettlehistory.co.uk ----------------- If you grew up on an American farm in the sixties or seventies, you know this sound. Through those years, that red International Harvester badge is on the tractor outside the feed store, and the Scout a generation of farm kids learns to drive in. By nineteen seventy-nine the company is posting the best year in its history. But fast forward seven years and The tractors stop rolling. The Farmall name is handed to a rival. A hundred-and-fifty-year-old company is simply switched off. One of the largest corporate collapses in American industrial history. So what happened? Now, the easy answer is the farm crisis of the early eighties. But a full year before that crisis arrived, one man had already dealt the company the wound that killed it. To understand how it came apart so fast, we need to go back to a Virginia wheat field — and a twenty-two-year-old with a machine his father spent fifteen years failing to build.