3-13-1928

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3-13-1928

Rubber Tractor Tire Patented

Hoyle Pounds, A Winter Garden Tractor Dealer, Invented A Better Tire and Rolled With It.

An American farmer on a tractor: The words conjure up an image of an overall-clad figure riding through amber waves of grain, maybe in Nebraska.

But it was not on the Great Plains that the rubber-tired farm tractor got its start. It was in Winter Garden where an astute West Orange businessman named Hoyle Pounds really put farmers on a roll.

After engineering studies and a football career at the University of Florida, Pounds opened a garage in Ocoee in 1914. In a few years he moved to Winter Garden, where he started a Ford dealership.

By 1918 Pounds was Florida's first Ford Motor Co. tractor dealer, historian Henry Swanson says in his book Countdown for Agriculture in Orange County, Florida.

The wave of land speculation that was pulling people into the state hit Pounds' business along with everyone else's. In 1919 Pounds sold eight tractors, but by 1926, the year he put up a two-story brick building on Plant Street, his agency was selling more than 40 a year.

Those tractors moved on metal wheels with metal cleats that grabbed into the soil. Highway building was bustling in Orange County, Swanson says, and farmers and citrus growers who needed to move their tractors from one piece of property to another now had to traverse these newly paved roads.

The result: the metal cleats chewed up the pavement, gaining tractors the name "highway eaters."

Faced with expensively hacked-up roadways, official passed laws forbidding the metal wheels from crossing the highways. And tractor owners complained to Hoyle Pounds.

From Oklahoma, Pounds ordered some large, hard rubber tires designed for oil-drilling equipment.

After considerable experimentation, Pounds realized that the gear ratio to the drive shaft would have to be changed because the wheels with rubber tires turned at a faster rate than the old metal wheels, moving on top of the soil rather than digging into it.

After all the details had been tested for several months, Pounds applied for and was granted Patent No. 1662208 on March 13, 1928, for his rim and lug design for airless tires.

The rubber tires not only made tractors faster. It increased their mobility.

"Pounds' invention `ushered in' the use of rubber tires on virtually all movable farm equipment," according to Swanson.

Still active into his 80s, Pounds led the Winter Garden volunteer fire department for 40 years, according to the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation's book All Aboard! A Journey Through Historic Winter Garden. Workers at Pounds Motor Co. served as volunteer firemen, and when the siren sounded, all work stopped as they ran to fight the blaze.

Before he died in 1981, Pounds received many state and national honors for his work to transform the old "highway eaters."

Pounds Motor Co., at Plant Street and Lakeview Avenue, continues to be an imposing presence in downtown Winter Garden, centered in the two-story brick building that Hoyle Pounds built in 1926. And his 1928 tractor has a spot of honor in the galleries of the Orange County Regional History Center.

[JC 1965 1,532]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.