Charles Henry Parr

Charles Henry Parr was an American mechanical engineer and inventor who helped pioneer the gasoline-powered agricultural tractor and who cofounded the Hart-Parr Company. Born in Wisconsin in 1868, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he met his future partner Charles Walter Hart. After graduating with honors the two founded a small engine company in Madison and then moved to Charles City, Iowa, to start Hart-Parr. In 1902 they developed a gasoline engine for tractors, and the next year they produced an engine that ran on kerosene using about half the fuel of the gasoline engine. Hart-Parr tractors were sold across the United States and abroad, and the firm also made shells during World War I. Parr left in 1923 to work for a street sweeper company in Illinois but returned to Hart-Parr and its successor Oliver Farm Equipment Company, where he stayed until his death in 1941.