At 13 my late father Arne was put in charge of the huge Wolf Locomobile. (The loco-what???)
Around 1930 the Locomobile in question was used at the Rånäs country estate north of Stockholm where my grandfather Valfrid was master blacksmith, and my dad got that first engineering job.
13 years old? Child labour! you might rightfully protest, and maybe so. But dad was a born techie, and he was very proud of his responsibility at the forefront of technology. Or, more truthfully, he absolutely loved tinkering with the impressive machine.
Locomobiles were widely used for agricultural purposes at the time. They were sometimes referred to as “traveling steam machines” but were in plain language the first tractors. The word locomobile derived from the already well-recognized innovations, ”automobile” and ”locomotive”.
In the early 1880s Rudolph Wolf in Magdeburg Luckau, Germany had designed and built the very first models, mainly used to drive threshing machines in the fields.
The first locomobiles imported to Sweden were built in England, home of the industrial revolution. In 1853 Munktells (later the “M” in Volvo BM, now Volvo Construction Equipment) started local manufacturing in Eskilstuna. Today, the company ranks #6 in their field after giants like Caterpillar and Komatsu, and employ more than 16,000 people.
The new technology rapidly conquered the world. In the US, The Locomobile Company of America was founded in Watertown, Massachusetts in 1899. The company later moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut and evolved into car manufacturing, replacing the steam with combustion engines.
Notably, some of the vehicles that later rolled out from the Bridgeport plant didn’t look anything like tractors. Quite the opposite. The Locomobile roadster of 1914 was a real piece of art.
Production at the Bridgeport plant ended in 1929, the year of the infamous Crash on Wall Street, and the beginning of the Great Depression. It was, in more ways than one, the end of a grand era.
In the 1950s I occasionally had the privilege to see my grandpa Valfrid in blazing action with the anvil, hammer and tongs. At that time the workshop where he spent most of his blacksmithing life came to specialize in leaf springs for cars, trucks, and other vehicles. A business that continued to evolve over nearly 70 years.
Rolf Andersson
Phyron Writer and Editor
