Dan, you have some of the history on these hitches but the 3 point hitch is credited to Henry Fergerson and his tractors not the green folks. I'm guessing Ford bought the rights to use it on their tractors from Fergerson. That is why the Ford N series tractors all have the 3 point hitches. Nothing changed for several years as the patent was still protected and no one else was willing to pay to use the patent. IHC came out with the 2 point fast hitch on the Super C tractor in either 1952 or 1953 and was displayed at state fairs all over the country as a demo. The point they were showing in the demo was that a variety of implements could be hooked up and unhooked with never leaving the tractor seat. Of course, that didn't include the PTO and hydraulic connections. I believe it was probably rated as a success as all future IHC tractors at least offered it as an option if not standard. Deere by this time could use the Fergerson 3 point hitch system as the patent protection had expired. Deere and most of the other tractor manufactures started offereing the 3 point hitches on their tractors. Deere tried to buy the rights to the IHC 2 point fast hitch but they wouldn't sell it. IHC also retained all the rights for production of all fast hitch implements as they wanted to have total control of that market as well. Allis Chalmers did somewhat of a theft of the IHC patent by making a couple changes and called it the snap coupler and introduced it. Some legal activity took place but don't know what was the outcome. So with IHC owning the rights to the 2 point fast hitch along with maintaining the rights to equipment production the other manufacturers had to incorporate something to compete and chose the 3 point Fergerson hitch which is still common to this day. IHC lost out most likely due to the equipment production as no one else could make fast hitch implements and IHC probably had the price up to where they weren't all that competitive on the market. For those of us with 2 point fast hitch IH tractor you will probably get the feeling we are very happy with the functionality of the design and convience of hooking up implements. The Super C tractor for instance has down pressure on the hitch system which if very rare even today on most 3 point systems. I'm in my late 60's now and I just dread having to hook up 3 point implements when any weight is involved as it requires a lot of juggling around with them. My disc mower for instance stays on the tractor until all the hay is done. I have a variety of fast hitch implements for my Super C and that is a whole different story. Those Ford 8N implements where fairly easy to muscle on to the hitch system because they were generally small and not all that heavy. I don't have any of the larger IHC tractors with a 2 point hitch system but have a feeling hooking up large heavy implements is much less of an effort then with the 3 point tractors. Maybe Jim Becker will chime in on this thread as he probably has considerable more documented history on the subject and always welcome his participation on this history channel. Hope this is of some learning for you, Hal.
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