"They come and pushed me off. They come with the cats... the Caterpillar tractors."
The Grapes of Wrath, Nunally Johnson screenplay
When you want to navigate areas where the terrain is uneven and muddy, what better solution than to take the road with you? This was precisely the conclusion of Englishman Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817) when he invented the "portable railway," the earliest incarnation of a full-track vehicle. Although his 1770 patent is open to interpretation, it could describe anything from a vehicle with shoed wheels to a system similar to that seen today where continuous tracks run between front and rear wheels.
The nineteenth century saw a glut of patents filed for vehicles sporting tracks. However, they suffered from problems such as poor steering and a lack of materials capable of taking the stresses and strains exerted by the system. But perhaps the biggest stumbling block was insufficient propulsive power, a problem overcome only with the advent of the internal combustion engine. Despite this, full-track, steam-powered vehicles had their uses; the Western Alliance for example used them during the Crimean War (1853-1856).
It is believed that the name "caterpillar track" was shrewdly trademarked in the early 1900s by Benjamin Holt, founder of Holt Manufacturing, later Caterpillar Inc., after hearing a British soldier quip how the tracked vehicles crawled like a caterpillar. The caterpillar track now appears in designs created for many terrains.
