Engines were used in many industries in the early 1900s. In factories with fast-spinning flywheels and belts pulling, engines brought power to the equipment that made tools, guns, cars, and textiles. In the forest they ran the saw mills, splitting great felled logs into lumbar, the building blocks of become houses across the nation. Traction engines pulled road graters and plows, their chimneys tall against the vast blue sky. On the farm engines gave the great threshing machines cause to separate the wheat from its chaff and straw, feeding the ever growing mountains of golden grain. Gas and steam engines they were; portable and stationary; and the precursor to today's tractor, the traction engine. The engines of the early 1900s gave rise to the first and second industrial revolutions, and they were quite literally the power behind the incredible economic growth seen at the turn of the century.