Nordic Tractor, The: The History and Heritage of Volvo, Valmet and Valtra

Justin Roberts

• Publisher: Old Pond Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781912158133
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Agriculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Nordic Tractor traces the history of tractor production in Sweden and Finland. The story goes back over 200 years to the 19th century when the industrial revolution was sweeping across Britain, and Sweden wanted to establish their own manufacturing powerhouses. This was an exciting and fast moving time for engineering and this book traces the ups, downs and eventual demise of some of the first manufacturers working to serve the particular needs of the agricultural and forestry industries in this densely forested and mountainous region. It then looks in depth at the companies who emerged from this, who learnt from their own and others' mistakes and built on the widespread technological advances of the time to build up names for themselves in Northern parts of Europe. Today, Valtra - now owned by AGCO - stands proudly as the last remaining agricultural tractor maker in Scandinavia, but The Nordic Tractor shows where their roots lie in the establishment and history of companies such as Bolinder, Munktells, Volvo and Valmet, who all stood out as being major players in the Nordic region. Including over 100 photos, many of which have been previously unpublished, this book will appeal to those with a specific interest in Nordic tractors, Nordic engineering and general Nordic history as well as the general tractor enthusiast.

CHAPTER ONE

The Nordic Industrial Revolution

Finland is not a country that many of us are familiar with. We have all heard of it but should we be asked much beyond the name of its capital, or to point to roughly where it is on the map then many of us would probably struggle. The town of Suolahti would be more obscure still, yet it is in this central part of the country that there lies a factory which holds something of the very essence of Finland and the Nordic countries as a whole. The factory belongs to Valtra, which is now part of the global agricultural group AGCO. It’s therefore somewhat unsurprising to learn that it usually produces over 8,000 tractors a year. This in itself is not a particularly large number – the new Holland plant at Basildon produces three times that – but these tractors brought into the world amongst the forests and lakes have a legacy behind them that is somewhat different to those that we may be more familiar with here in western parts of Europe.

How far back this legacy actually stretches depends upon one’s inclination to seek out industry’s roots in the Nordic countries. The links that tie the modern Valtra tractor factory in Finland to the arrival of industry in Sweden are strong and undeniable; in fact, they may be traced deeper still and we can find them burrowing down to the very time and place of the birth of the Industrial Revolution itself, the British midlands of the eighteenth century. This might sound rather distant and obscure, but the story of Valtra can be followed way back across the North Sea to the small village of Norton in Hales, deep in the heart of rural Shropshire. The reason we might consider this happily innocent settlement as the starting point of our tale revolves around the year 1774 when Samuel Owen was born to his farming parents of that parish. In the great annals of history his name barely registers but he was destined to become one of those disciples of the great technological bubble that we now consider to be the start of the modern world and he was instrumental, as many other British engineers were, in taking the seeds of this expertise and knowledge and planting them firmly in European countries and beyond.

The reasons why Britain, and more specifically England, happened to become the cradle of industrialisation are beyond the scope of this book, yet the mills, factories, docks, canals and notorious slums are inescapably the work of home-grown entrepreneurs and engineers as they rapidly absorbed and deployed the new knowledge that a more disciplined scientific establishment was providing. These methods and techniques were also carried around the globe as the country exported its initial success to all the continents while deriving a great dividend from doing so. It is only natural that the profits generated were appreciated by the rapidly expanding merchant classes but somehow one feels that the landed gentry never really took to the idea of the bricks, smoke and waste despoiling what they considered the pastoral ideal, an ideal which they had owned and ruled and shaped as the whim took them, for centuries and was now threatened by elements outside their control. However, we cannot dwell too long on the likely origin of the grief and antagonism that has expressed itself in the division between workforce and owners over the intervening years, for Samuel Owen, our lowly born son of toil, has grown into a bright young man who is giving lessons in arithmetic and geometry to others, despite having barely attended school himself. After a number of small jobs, going into service at a nearby manor and then working on canal boats, he gained apprenticeship to a carpenter and helped eke out his means by teaching the subjects for which he had found a passion and talent. As may be imagined, this was never going to prove a suitable situation for such an intelligent and ambitious fellow, so having been captivated by the potential of steam power he made his way to the new factory established by the inventor of the much-improved steam engine, James Watt. This was around 1795, nearly 30 years after Watt had developed his idea of a separate condenser for the then grossly expensive to run Newcombe steam pumps. Watt had experienced some difficulty in getting his improvement onto the market and it wasn’t until he teamed up with Matthew Boulton in 1775 that the idea became a commercial reality, six years after he had patented it in 1769. The names Boulton and Watt became synonymous with early steam engines, although it must be borne in mind that they didn’t at first make them in a factory, but licensed the technology to others and despatched their own engineers, and often James Watt himself, to supervise the building of the engine components in diverse forges around the country for assembly on-site. It wasn’t until 1795 that the then wealthy James Watt built a new foundry at Soho for the exclusive manufacture of engines and it was about this time that Samuel Owen joined the new venture as a model maker.

The 1770s also saw another invention that, on the face of it, was hardly an earth-shattering development, but in fact it provided a tremendous impetus to the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s leading role within it. The device presented a major leap forward in cannon boring technique and was intended to create more perfectly round holes in cast iron gun barrels. The inventor was John Wilkinson, who hailed from Cumbria in the very north of England. He had expanded the family business by establishing various ironworks in North Wales and Shropshire and his patent for boring naval cannon was taken out in 1775. So successful and useful was it that the Navy took steps to overturn the patent four years later and so prevent Wilkinson enjoying a monopoly in gun supply. By the end of 1775 Wilkinson had refined the technique to support the cutting tool at either end while still turning the cylinder and the following year, the first Boulton and Watt steam engine with accurately-machined cylinders was installed at one of his furnaces to supply the air draught. These cannon and cylinder boring devices are regarded by many as the world’s first machine tools and are the forerunner of all the CNC tools and robots we see in factories today. It is also suggested that Henry Maudslay’s later improvements to the basic lathe are the germ of such tools, but these didn’t appear until around 1800.

As we shall see in due course, modifying a method designed to create weapons to one that produces more civilised products was a development to be echoed 170 years later in the Nordic countries, as facilities designed to conduct warfare more effectively were put to peaceful use. Over two centuries ago, it was James Watt who saw the cannon hole borer as the perfect tool for creating cylinders for his steam engines while, more recently, a particular armaments factory in Finland adapted its expertise in producing artillery to making tractors; but we are getting ahead of ourselves on that point. Meanwhile, back in the eighteenth century, the inventor of the boring device was another of those manufacturing geniuses upon whose efforts the Industrial Revolution was built. John Wilkinson became a friend and collaborator with Boulton and Watt but is less well known than either, despite being a major force behind the construction of the world’s first iron bridge, a structure that still stands at a place that is now a World Heritage Site and is known simply as Ironbridge.

By the late 1700s, James Watt was equipped with a rudimentary knowledge of thermodynamics (a branch of science that he had pioneered), a good practical experience of building and operating steam engines, the wealth of a man who has seen his inventiveness put to productive use and now the tools to continue improving the engines which were enjoying a greater popularity than ever. This increase in demand for steam power was a consequence of industry outgrowing the supply of natural power available to it. Water and windmills were highly dependent upon weather and terrain and so a reliable source of energy to turn the cogs and mills throughout Britain and beyond suddenly became hugely important to the economy. Samuel Owen, our newly married carpenter from Shropshire, found himself at 21 within the very heart of this great upheaval and his abilities were quickly recognised by Boulton and Watt who encouraged his further learning and studies throughout his time with them. However, famed and respected as they were for the production of steam engines, the company was not the only supplier in the field, for up in Yorkshire there was, in the city of Leeds, a firm by the name of Fenton, Murray and Wood who were bitter rivals to Boulton and Watt. In fact, so strong was the animosity between the two companies that the younger James Watt, son of the founder, later went so far as to purchase the land adjoining the upstart’s premises in a bid to stop them expanding, a plan that appeared not to have worked too well as the Yorkshire firm enjoyed a strong reputation for the quality of their engineering and it didn’t seem to have interfered with their business to any great extent. It is now a matter of speculation as to whether the poaching of staff, alongside various well-documented episodes of industrial espionage upon both sides, helped fuel this antagonism; we can’t even be sure that it happened at all, yet it would appear that sometime around 1800, Owen moved up to Leeds and had been working for Fenton, Murray and Wood for several years until, once again, fate knocked upon his door.

In 1804, he was preparing to move to America where his skills would doubtless have been in demand, yet destiny intervened in the form of a Swedish knight of the realm by the name of Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz who had been commissioned to procure four steam engines for use in Sweden while on his travels through Europe. The more common account is that Edelcrantz was introduced to Owen while the latter was still in the employ of Watt, yet this would have been unlikely if Owen had already moved to Fenton, Murray and Wood by 1800. Whatever the precise history, it is known that the Swede was most impressed by Samuel and asked that he be sent over to install and commission the engines which were eventually purchased from the Yorkshire firm. Thus it was that Owen made his first visit to Stockholm in 1804 and then returned to London to work with Arthur Woolf, inventor of the compound steam engine. In 1806, he was once again invited to Sweden to assemble another, yet upon his arrival he discovered that the steam engine he had been hired to install was already being built by Fenton, Murray and Wood’s own men which rather left him out of pocket and at a loose end. It was his intention to return home and take up employment in the UK again, however, Edelcrantz had different ideas and Owen was persuaded by the knight to take a position with the Burgsund Foundry of Stockholm (established by Thomas Lewis of Scotland in 1769) where he worked for three years. Having thus acclimatised himself to Swedish life, he then purchased his own premises at Kungsholmen, which at the time was reserved as an area for encouraging new industry, a rather far-sighted policy that was repeated elsewhere in Scandinavia. About this time and occasion is generally considered the birth of industrialisation in the country and since it is due in great part to the effort, energy and foresight of Edelcrantz, it is worth delving a little deeper into this gentleman’s background.

Before we do, however, it is worth pausing to consider what we mean by the word ‘industrialisation’ in the context of a country. It is true that every country has industry of some sort but it is by no means certain that every country is industrialised. This may sound slightly nonsensical, an understandable reaction to what would appear to be an obvious contradiction, but I’d like to suggest that there is more to industrialisation than having a few factories scattered about the countryside; there does, in fact, need to be an ethos inherent to the society, an indigenous will to make things, a desire to innovate and produce goods that are not agricultural or administrative in their nature. This urge to manufacture is not as apparent in some societies as it is in others. Nobody doubts that the Germans have a passion for making things, Finland and Sweden are a brace of countries where production appears out of proportion to their populations while the Dutch are another group who are happy to get their hands dirty, Austria also, and so on. But what about countries such as Portugal, Greece or Ireland? I would preclude the latter from a list of industrialised countries if only because their passion is for building and construction; any manufacturing is sporadic and when it does occur, it can do very well although it would seem to do so against the odds. France is somewhat ambiguous; it has the full knowledge that industry is key to a strong economy but it somehow can’t let go of its rural roots and revolutionary zeal, a situation which is condemned mainly by those who hold values shaped more by economic logic than human experience.

As for Britain, then of course the answer is yes, or is it? I don’t believe the answer is anywhere near as clear as we would like to think. Doubtless, it is the cradle of industrialisation as self-made men made more of themselves by harnessing the available labour to the new machines. But, generally speaking, these entrepreneurs were not those that ran the country, it was the landed gentry who tended to perform that particular function and many of these regarded entitlement and inherited wealth as the natural order of the world. It is right there, at this discontinuity between ancient possession and generated prosperity that the source of much of the class struggle that we have witnessed since, lies. The industrialised masses, bruised by the centuries of serfdom endured by their ancestors, set against the conservative land owners with the latter never having forgiven the former for disrupting their rural idyll. The Germans suffered something similar with the Junker elite of the east resenting the thrust of modernisation and the disruption it caused to their comfort and expectations, but the need for coherence within society when faced with various adversities of a type which Britain, thanks to her natural sea defences, never encountered, tended to erode distinctions between classes, or at least engendered a greater mutual respect between countrymen even if it was not total. In the northern areas of Europe there is even less evidence of a class structure having any great effect on the way that society functioned. There was certainly an upper echelon of rulers that engaged in the usual battles, alliances and conquests of medieval Europe but the people of Sweden, which included the areas we now call Norway and Finland, were never subjected to a feudal regime as most of their contemporaries were further south.

In addition to the laissez-faire approach of Britain and the more infrastructure-led plans of Germany, there also appeared a third route to industrialisation, a path that was taken by Sweden and to understand quite what it was, and how it emerged, we must, as already promised, turn to the advancement of Edelcrantz within society, for he was nothing if not a prominent figure of the Swedish establishment of the time. There is little doubt that he made an indelible impact on the birth of modern Sweden and one cannot stroll around the country’s recent history without regularly tripping over his presence and influence. The talented Edelcrantz was born in 1754 to a father who was a professor of theology and languages at the Academy of Turku, a prestigious institute in a prestigious city in the early eighteenth century. The family name was actually Clewberg and this was how he was known until he was knighted by King Gustav lll and took the name Edelcrantz as his title. His mother had been the 16-year-old daughter of the bishop of that city when married and was 24 years the junior of her husband who was regarded as a pillar of Swedish academia. Turku itself is situated on the south-eastern corner of what is now an independent Finland but was then under Swedish rule until Finland was ceded to the Russians in 1808. The city of Turku was recognised as the major commercial and governmental centre for the state and was destined to play a further minor role in the history of Nordic tractors in the twentieth century as home to the Abo Iron Company, who produced the Kullervo.

Abraham Niclas Clewberg grew up in a family devoted to the quest for knowledge and enlightenment; being familiar with several languages from an early age he was something of a child prodigy and enlisted for a degree in optics at his father’s academy while still only 11. At 16, he was appointed an associate professor before moving to Stockholm in 1780 where he held a number of government posts before embarking on his quest for industrial knowledge abroad. A man of great intelligence and ambition, he came to be appointed to many top positions within the government during his lifetime. These included such posts as Director of the Court Orchestra, Curator of the Royal Museums and eventually Director of the Board of Trade. He also found time to write and translate poetry while developing an optical telegraph system that could transmit messages across country four times quicker than the French equivalent. Designed primarily to raise the alarm in case of invasion, it was put to the test just the once when the British fleet under the command of Nelson attacked Denmark in 1800. As a then ally of its fellow Scandinavian state, Sweden fully expected to be next on the list of the admiral’s ambitions, but Denmark hastily settled its differences while Sweden also entered into a treaty with the belligerent British later that year. During this emergency, the optical telegraph running from Denmark to Stockholm had seen a mere four days’ service but it had established Edelcrantz’s reputation as leader in technology and demonstrated his ability to get things done in a hurry.

In parallel to his scientific career, he was also responsible for translating into his home tongue many poetical and musical works which included ‘God Save The King’ as well as the Scottish Ossian songs. He co-wrote an opera, was elected to the Academy of Music and unsuccessfully proposed to Maria Edgeworth, a progressive author of fiction who was born at Black Bourton in Oxfordshire but spent most of her life in Ireland. The end of the brief courtship was brought about by Maria’s intention to remain with her friends and family, but it was always unlikely that such an independent woman would be happy settling down as just the wife of a Swedish intellectual. Neither went on to be married after their parting, the Edelcrantz title expiring upon his demise in 1821, aged 66 while Maria’s second novel, ‘Leonora’, was regarded by her stepmother as something of a lament for a love foregone. At this point it is worth noting another interesting, if rather tenuous connection in our tale, for Maria’s father was something of a writer and inventor himself who is credited with making the first attempts at creating a caterpillar track which he described as a ‘cart that lays its own road’. Despite over 40 years of tinkering, he never perfected or commercialised his invention, yet both Volvo and Valmet made use of the device a century and a half later. Oh, and he too proposed an optical telegraph system for Ireland which was different again to that of France and Sweden.

Agriculture was another activity which was fortunate in not escaping Edelcrantz’s attention for he was instrumental in establishing Sweden’s Academy of Agriculture in 1811 which was based at Östermalm, now a district of Stockholm city centre. Here was created the experimental field in which many of the techniques in crop and animal husbandry that he had encountered on his travels were practised and adapted to Scandinavian conditions. Forestry was also a large part of its remit, for the Nordic countries are rich in this resource and managing plantations as well as natural woodland is a vital part of the rural scene in Sweden and Finland. To fully comprehend the evolution of the tractor in these countries, it is important to note that agriculture and forestry are not the two distinct entities as we understand them in the UK and Ireland. The extreme cl...