In the mid-1920s, a curious conversion kit became available. 

From what I could find, Snow-Motors Inc., based out of Detroit, Mich., offered a kit that replaced the wheels and axles to a number of conveyances with “two revolving cylinders instead of wheels — something on the order of a steam roller,” as Time reported in January 1926.

The snow motor conversion enabled someone to travel from 6 to 8 mph across snow and ice with ease. “The machine has already proved its usefulness in deep snow previously unnavigable,” Time continued. “One such machine has done the work which formerly required three teams.”

In the promotional film below, courtesy of YouTuber LETHLSS, the Snow-Motors kit is demonstrated with a Fordson tractor and a Chevrolet automobile. Thanks to Bob Kuhns, of Arlington, Kan., who brought this intriguing contraption to our attention. He came across the video posted on the TreasureNet forum; that version of the film suggests it resides in the “Archives of Michigan.”

Watch the film on TreasureNet.com: “Fordson snow-motor.”

Read Time’s 1926 account of Snow-Motors Inc.: “Business & Finance: Snow Motors.”

Sam Moore

In about 1905, Henry Ford told Eugene W. Lewis (a Timken bearing salesman), “I am going to make a motor car that will be light and strong and clean so that women can drive it.

“And it will have enough power to do any kind of work called for, and will be sold so any man who can own an average horse and buggy can afford to own a car.”

Henry introduced his dream car, the revolutionary Model T Ford, on Oct. 1, 1908. The car weighed 1,200 pounds and had 20 hp while its high clearance, transverse leaf springs and front axle pivoted in the center, which allowed the little car to twist and turn as it crawled over the rough rural roads. The T could grind through mud, snow or sand, climb steep grades and ford deep streams, although the driver had to keep the pedal firmly depressed the whole time to keep the transmission in low gear.

	A beautifully restored 1911 Model T Ford delivery wagon. Photo by Sam Moore.

The planetary transmission made the car easy to drive, although an early account in The New Yorker made driving a Model T sound pretty exciting. “To get under way, you simply hooked the third finger of the right hand around a lever (hand throttle) on the steering column, pulled down hard and shoved your (left) foot forcibly against the low-speed pedal. These were simple, positive motions; the car responded by lunging forward with a roar. After a few seconds of this turmoil, you took your foot off the pedal, eased up a mite on the throttle, and the car catapulted directly into high with a series of jerks and was off on its glorious errand. The abruptness of this departure was never equaled in other cars of this period.”

By the time the all-new Model A came out in 1928, more than 15 million Model T Fords had been sold, and the ubiquitous “Tin Lizzies” were everywhere. Tin Lizzie was only one of the many nicknames given to the car. Others were Flivver, Bouncing Betty, Leaping Lena, the Spirit of St. Vitus and the Mechanical Cockroach.

In addition to the nicknames, there were probably more jokes about the little Ford than there are about Pat and Mike. Most of the jokes kidded about the car’s diminutive size, such as the one about the Cadillac owner who carried a Ford in his toolbox for use in case the Caddie broke down. It was said that Fords didn’t need to have headlights “because they’re light enough without ’em.” Another joke maintained that Ford was going to paint his cars yellow and sell them in bunches like bananas. Another told about the man looking sadly up a tree. When asked why, he said, “I was cranking my Ford and it flew off the handle.”

T’s had a well deserved reputation for being tinny and rattling, resulting in jokes such as: A farmer replaced the tin roof on his barn. He bundled up the old twisted tin and sent it to the Ford factory. Shortly after, he got a letter back saying, “Your car is the worst wreck we have ever seen. It will take us two weeks to repair it.” It was said that Henry Ford was a great evangelist because his cars had shaken hell out of more folks than Billy Sunday. Wags said that Henry was going to supply a trained squirrel with each car to pick up the nuts that fell off.

Most owners thought their flivvers were dependable, including the farmer whose will specified that he be buried in his Ford, “because it’s gotten me out of every hole I’ve ever been in.” When Ford bought Lincoln, people joked that a man was hired to paint whiskers on Fords to make them look like Lincoln. Finally, there was the one about the guy who asked a friend, “Did ya hear the latest Ford joke?” To which the man replied with feeling, “I certainly hope so!”

Despite the jokes, the Model T put America on wheels by being a dependable car that was affordable for farmers and working men. Henry Ford became a very rich man, but his development of the moving assembly line, as well as his enlightened labor practices (such as $5 pay for an eight-hour day introduced in 1914, to the horror of other manufacturers) ultimately benefited every working man in the country. As a result of the $5 wage, Ford became so famous that there was talk of running him for president on the Democratic ticket. While Ford himself was not the least bit interested, the possibility gave rise to another joke; Will Rogers said, “Ford could get elected president all right. He’d only have to make one speech: Voters, if I’m elected I’ll change the front (of the Model T).”

Sam Moore

Whenever we old timers begin to long for “the good old days,” we should hark back to some of the home remedies with which we were tortured, as kids, by our well-meaning parents, notably chest cold and cough home remedies.

The following (slightly edited) recollection of home “medicare” in those far-away days was written by Lula Walker in The Rural New Yorker magazine of Jan. 7, 1950.

“In the winter, at the first sniffle we were dosed generously with castor oil minus any camouflage of peppermint oil or other pleasant disguise. At bedtime, the chest was thoroughly greased with coal oil and lard. The next step was to ‘bake it in,’ a feat accomplished by standing in front of a hot stove until the chest had taken on a violent hue of red. Then a piece of flannel was clapped on and pinned securely to your long woolen underwear.

“These preliminaries over, next was a hot foot bath. A tablespoon of mustard in water hot as one could bear was Mother’s standard formula. Of course, our ideas of what ‘one could bear’ differed radically. My fervent pleas for just one dipper of cold water were unavailing. It took real heat, Mother maintained, to properly open pores. When my feet resembled a pair of boiled lobsters, the treatment was concluded.

“Next day, a batch of cherry bark was brewed and converted into a sticky, sickish syrup of which I was given hourly doses. If hoarseness accompanied the cold, there was further punishment with a mixture of honey and alum. If a coughing spell struck, Mother invariably administered black pepper. Her belief in this remedy may have been justified since, to forestall a second dose of the fiery mixture, I made a superhuman effort to suppress my bark.

“On that autumn morning each year when I looked out on a world covered with frost I knew my doom was sealed. It was goodbye to summer and farewell to cotton underwear. At breakfast would come the verdict, ‘Time to put ’em on.’ Pleas for a stay of sentence were unavailing. Highly redolent of mothballs, the hateful woolens were hauled from the attic trunk and hung out on the clothesline to air.

“Saturday or not, a bath would be in order and this would come at bedtime. All day I lived in a state of dread. At school, games failed to cheer me. The juicy Jonathan apple in my lunch pail lost its savor. When nothing was said at suppertime, I took hope at the possibility of slipping off to bed to gain another 24 hours’ grace and quickly retired to the sitting room to work on my arithmetic. From the kitchen came the ominous rattle of a wash boiler and the sound of water being poured. Mother appeared in the doorway with: ‘The water’s hot. You can go right ahead. I’ve laid out your underwear.’

“My fate was sealed when Father came in from chores and remarked: ‘Air’s pretty nippy. Likely to be ice on the rain barrel in the morning.’ Before the glowing old range was a steaming washtub and across a chair the obnoxious underwear. The bath over, I gingerly drew on the garment that for the next six months would literally be a thorn in the flesh. Nights would bring no respite, for in the ‘Gay Nineties,’ underwear worked on a 24-hour shift, from Saturday to Saturday. And, no night was more hideous than that first one of the season. No sooner had you relieved an itch in one spot than another claimed your attention. You scratched yourself to sleep.

“Finally, the first day of spring arrived and I eloquently pleaded to ‘take ’em off.’ My Mother would retort: ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer,’ but eventually even she had to agree that the hated wool underwear could be retired in favor of the cotton variety.”

My mother had been forced to take castor oil when she was in the hospital having me and she hated it! Consequently, we kids never had to swallow the stuff. However, the dreaded mustard plaster was Mom’s own favorite form of torture. At the first sign of a chest cold, she mixed a paste of dry mustard and water and smeared it all over half of a large cloth, which was then folded over and applied to the chest. In about one minute, it started to burn and kept getting hotter and hotter, searing the skin on the chest. No amount of wailing and begging could induce Mom to remove the thing until the allotted time was up and the skin was just short of blistered.

Instead of cherry bark syrup for a cough, Mom melted a tablespoonful of Vick’s and made us swallow that, although it just tasted odd, not yucky. We wore cotton underwear and long cotton stockings, but I don’t remember woolen long johns. And, of course, you never, never sat on the ground, or went without your coat buttoned up, or you’d “catch your death.”

Those were the days, weren’t they?

A separator and an unusual round DeLaval milking machine crate. Courtesy of Kent Gordon.

June is National Dairy Month.

It is also, among other things, National Iced Tea Month, National Candy Month and National Don’t Eat Cheese After Noon Month. And no, I don’t make up this stuff: As Will Rogers famously observed, “I don’t have to!”

Back to Dairy Month. At Farm Collector, we’re celebrating that by taking a long, hard, loving look at cream separators. In the history of civilization many noteworthy discoveries have immeasurably improved the lot of mankind and fostered the march of progress. Penicillin? General relativity? Copernican theory? Yes, each has its place – but don’t overlook the role of the cream separator.

Without cream separators, the process of separating cream from milk would be vastly slower, less efficient and highly prone to quality issues. Without separators, there’d be less cream – and less ice cream.

Industry experts might argue this point, but I’m pretty well convinced that America runs on ice cream. Need proof? Visit any antique tractor show. If you see people – especially men – standing in line, chances are very good that there’s an ice cream freezer at the far end. In my experience, there are at least two things that the average man has very little patience for: shopping and standing in line for anything other than ice cream. Auctions are a curious exception to that rule, but that is a topic for another day, say, during National Auction Month.

Early methods of separating cream were slow, inexact and prone to contamination. To the farm family, the modern separator must have seemed an absolute marvel – and one that paid its own way, to boot. Imagine the arrival of a device that not only worked with stunning speed but also generated a regular revenue stream. On many farms, the cream separator made “extras” possible; on others, it literally put food on the table.

In the early 1900s, cream separators quickly became an indispensable feature of farm life. As a collectible, the category is broad and deep. And yet, like Rodney Dangerfield, the cream separator gets little respect. Anyone who’s used one is quick to vouch for the nuisance of cleaning the intricate mechanisms. But it’s time to abandon old grievances. In the name of all that is smooth and frosty, in the name of shakes, splits and sundaes, take a second look at cream separators, and scoop up a sweet relic of the past.

Sam Moore

By now, most Rusty Iron fans have probably seen the video of the Fordson tractor and the Chevrolet car rigged up with spiral tubes instead of wheels to pull them through snow.

(If you’ve missed it, jump over to “Snow-Motors Inc. Conversion” and you can watch the entire film.)

However, there’s some misinformation on some sites where it’s claimed that the thing was invented by Henry Ford and that Ford himself is the tractor driver in the film.

Now for the truth about the snow gear and the film.

In the March 29, 1906, issue of The Automobile there was the following tidbit titled, “To the North Pole by Auto.” Under a dateline of March 26 from Minneapolis, the story reads:

A special to the New York Times says that Charles E.H. Burch and Frederick R. Burch, Minneapolis men, will attempt to reach the North Pole in an ice automobile of their own invention. The vehicle is supplied with all the comforts one might expect to have in a houseboat. The inventors have engaged in exploration in Alaska more than once, and it was for the purpose of making trips on the trackless wastes of Alaska in quest of mineral wealth that their idea was perfected and a working model was built.

After they had the vehicle in working order, the idea of a polar exploration suggested itself and the brothers announced that while their original plan was not to discover the pole there was no reason why they could not make the trip if the proper interest was shown in the expedition. They have the automobile in operation at Lake Calhoun, where it was inspected yesterday by interested residents of Minneapolis. It is built like a large streetcar and is heated by hot water. The Burch brothers assert that they have selected a route to the pole that is as sure as their means of locomotion is certain. They believe they will be able to obtain ample financial backing for the venture.

The Burch brothers were actually from Seattle, Wash., not Minneapolis, and Charles’ initials were E.S. and not E.H. as stated in the article. In 1901, Charles E.S. Burch was awarded a patent for what he called an “Ice Locomotive.” The patent drawing (see below) shows the huge “streetcar”-like contraption with which the Burch brothers proposed to reach the North Pole.

The 1922 patent that Fred Burch assigned to the Armstead Snow Motors Corp.

No further record of the proposed trip has surfaced. Both Frederick Cook (in 1908) and Robert Peary (1909) claimed to be first to reach the Pole; both claims are disputed. However, the Burch brothers did remain active in the snow vehicle field. In 1908, C.E.S. Burch received a patent for an “Automobile Sleigh,” a smaller machine shaped like a large automobile, with a pair of horizontal screws under the rear and a single, large, steerable ski at the front under the internal combustion engine.

In 1917, Fred Burch patented a small, open motorized vehicle with large drive drums around which the helical vanes were welded, and that more closely resembled the Fordson tractor in the film. Another patent was issued to Fred Burch in 1922 that improved upon his 1917 design and shows a small roadster-type automobile mounted on the drums. This patent was assigned by Burch to Armstead Snow Motors Inc., New York City, N.Y.

Armstead actually built the Fordson tractor and the Chevrolet car conversions shown in the film, which was a promotional piece put out by the Armstead firm. The tractor driver in the film is, of course, not Henry Ford.

The screw theory for propelling a vehicle over snow or ice wasn’t Charles Burch’s idea. William Harvey, Toronto, Canada, patented an “Ice or Snow Locomotive” in 1898, as did John and Nils Peterson in 1899. Both machines featured long, horizontal screws as drivers, as did many other snow vehicle patents over the first half of the 20th century. I even found a 1925 patent to convert an ordinary bicycle into a screw-driven snow vehicle. A runner was attached under each wheel, with the rear one containing rollers and gears that drove a trailing screw. As the bike was pedaled, the rollers were turned by the rear wheel, and in turn drove the gears that turned the screw and supposedly pushed the bike through the snow.

The idea isn’t dead by any means; here’s a video (courtesy YouTuber 01e9)  that shows a modern machine with the same drive screws that’s apparently made by ZIL for the Russian army.

It’s amazing what can be found in the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

At the turn of the century, the pace of life was much slower.

	Patent 588,361: Bicycle built for two patented by Benjamin F. Shurz, Marion, Ohio, Aug. 17, 1897.

Land mass transportation was by railroad trains, inter-urbans, stagecoach and such. There were no automobiles or buses.

Local transportation was limited to walking, horse or horse-and-buggy or bicycle. The bicycle was the most economical and efficient means of individual local transport.

Edward Huber lent a hand here. On Aug. 17, 1897, Benjamin F. Shurz, Marion, Ohio, was awarded a patent (No. 588,361) for his idea for a bicycle-built-for-two. On the application, he assigned a one-third interest to Edward Huber.

Frank Huber, Edward’s son, although employed with Huber’s other enterprises, had a cycle shop in which it is believed the Shurz bicycle was built and from which the cycle was marketed. This enterprise was successful in that it provided for the manufacture and sale of a bicycle built for two.

This was no ordinary bicycle. It was a bicycle built for two. Today we view a bicycle built for two as designed for tandem riding – one person riding directly behind the other. But with the Shurz design, the riders rode side by side.

This was a wonderful arrangement for a young man and his lady friend. They could ride together and converse as they rode. They had to be in no hurry, because wherever it was they were going was not as important as being together.

Riding side by side could have been a great opportunity for two business men to compare plans, discuss business opportunities or a change of course in their manufacturing operation. Besides, it would have given good friends a chance to just ride together in peace.

The author’s wife, Rosemary, with a bicycle built for two at Disney Boardwalk, Kissimmee, Fla. (Click the image for a larger version.)

The Shurz bicycle was not just two bicycles assembled together. Instead, it had a rather wide frame with wheels at the outside. There were, of course, two stations for riders, each having a steering apparatus and pedals. Power was delivered to the rear wheels via a roller chain. When turning, both front wheels turned, but the rider on the side in which they were turning had to stop pedaling to put that side of the contraption in a free wheeling mode. It was not equipped with a differential to let the inside wheel move at a slower pace than the outside wheel.

To my knowledge, none of these early Shurz/Huber bicycles exist. However, the design is in use yet today. All one has to do is to visit the Disney Boardwalk at Kissimmee, Fla. There one can rent bicycles built for two, four and six to pedal around the boardwalk.

	Detroit Electric Car Co. car.

Hybrids and electric cars are all the rage today, but electrics are nothing new.

They were quite popular at the turn of the 20th century, especially among ladies, who were then thought to be too delicate to crank an internal combustion engine (no self-starters in those days). Even Mrs. Henry Ford was said to drive a Detroit Electric car that was powered by batteries made by her husband’s friend Thomas Edison (who also drove a Detroit Electric, of course).

Mrs. Hamilton Fish, a wealthy New Yorker, bought an electric car of unknown make. The salesman who delivered the thing showed her how to work the single power lever; push forward to go, pull back to back up, and lift up to stop. Mrs. Fish sallied forth on her maiden voyage and did all right … for a while.

Circa-1920 Detroit Electric Car Co. brochure. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

Electric cars are quiet, not a good thing for pedestrians accustomed to listening for the clatter of horses’ hooves. A man stepped off the curb in front of Mrs. Fish, who panicked and shoved the lever forward, knocking the poor guy to the ground. As he lay there dazed, the good lady jerked the lever to the rear, and hit him again. Still trying to find “stop,” Mrs. Fish pushed forward and struck the poor soul a third time.

The hapless victim managed to scramble to his feet and limp down the street (apparently no lawsuits in those days either). Mrs. Fish finally got the contraption stopped, got out and stalked haughtily away, abandoning her new car forever.

Mrs. Fish was one of only a few, however, who abandoned the motor car. Around 1916, leading American bankers and economists were predicting the imminent burst of the automobile bubble due to market saturation. Someone asked Billy Durant, then the flamboyant head of General Motors, when Americans would stop buying new cars. Durant replied confidently, “When they stop making babies!”

Durant was right. Even though we read every day about how GM and Chrysler are struggling and are on the verge of bankruptcy, Americans still love their cars, although today they probably buy more motor vehicles than they make babies.