1920 International Harvester Titan Tractor

When I photographed this tractor it was running. It idled smoothly with its flywheel and belt drive wheel spinning. As you can see from the photo, this is a 1920 model. In this year, IH built 21,503 of these machines, the most of any year of manufacture. These two cylinder, kerosene burning tractors were mostly replacements for horses and steam engines which required a workforce of 10-14 workers to operate. This tractor can be operated by a single farmer. They were categorized as 10 drawbar and 20 belt drive horse power, so known as a 10-20. The Nebraska test measured their actual output at 16 drawbar and 26 belt horse power. It has a transmission with two forward speeds and one reverse. Due to the "tractor wars" of the late teens IH began cutting the purchase price from $1125 in 1918 down to $700 in 1922, and the company threw in a free plow. Their main competitor was Henry Ford's Fordson tractors. While they did plow and do field work, their main use was to power thrashing machines and other equipment using belt drive. The large tank up front was filled with water and acted as a radiator for the water cooled motor.