David Brown

The history of David Brown

David Brown made wooden gears for the textile trade, and came to tractors through a partnership that did not last.

He was a pattern maker who started his business in Huddersfield in 1860, and the firm's main trade was cutting wooden gears for the Huddersfield textile industry. On a trip through the United States in the 1930s the degree of mechanisation on American farms made a lasting impression on the founder's grandson.

In 1929 another tractor pioneer, Harry Ferguson, built the Black Tractor with his patented hydraulic linkage. A partnership with Ferguson produced around 1,350 Ferguson-Brown Type A tractors in 1936, but it soon came apart. Ferguson left England for the United States, where he later went into partnership with Ford.

The first tractor to carry David Brown's own name was the VAK 1 — vehicle, agricultural, kerosene, model 1 — shown in 1939. Orders for 3,000 were in hand. The outbreak of war meant the number could not be held, and actual production came to only 1,000.

In 1972 David Brown Tractors became a subsidiary of Tenneco International of Texas and was folded into the J I Case Company. The tractors were built from then on with an orange engine and gearbox block, and the car business was sold to a Ford Motor Company subsidiary. In 1985 Tenneco took over International Harvester as well, and the tractors, now made under the Case-IH name, were sold in the red and black Case-IH scheme.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: David Brown, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.