Letter Series Question

THolmer

Member
I have always wondered. How did International Harvester pick the letters they used? Why did they pick A, B, C, H or M?


Thanks
 
All i ever read was if you had a 160 acre farm you could afford a H, and if you had 240 acres or more, you could afford to have a M tractor.
 
I was told by an old IHC guy that in his youth it was said that Cyrus H McCormick made FARMing All you needs as easy as A, B, C;
hence A B C H M. Who knows?
 
You guys are missing some letters. What about the W, U & T. Sure the U & T aren't tractors. The W is my favorite of the letter series.
 
Something I found curious is the serial prefixes:

A = FAA
B = FAB
H = FBH
M = FBK (?)

I suspect that at one point, they intended to name the big tractor the "K" but then decided that sounded stupid, so they went with M, but they had the serial plates all printed up already.

Did any of the pre-production prototypes of the M have the model designation on the hood?

W has always stood for WHEEL, and T for TRACK.
 
I know that, but the comment was C, H and M meant Cyrus Hall McCormick. The C wasnt out until 1948, so the C wasnt out when the letter series was introduced, so unless he went by Hall McCormick, CHM wouldnt be right for tweh H and M.
 
(quoted from post at 17:45:59 10/28/16) Duh on my end! Sorry about that!
IDK myself but an intresting topic. The Green tractors were named similar, so maybe one or the other brands copied each other??
 
I know some manufacturer's choose their model letters so they didn't sound like the other ones they had in use to avoid confusion when you're on the phone trying to do parts. "C", "B", "D", "E", "P" and "G"
can sound a lot alike. Other than that it could be models that never worked out or where maybe planned but never happened. Heck maybe they left room between B and H and H and M because they thought the the
next series of tractors would be the C, I and N or C, J and N (if they stayed away from Vowels). Or it could be advertising like the Affordable "A", The Better "B", the Handy "H" and the Mighty "M".
 
Once they decided to use letters, I don't think there is anything to read into what specific letters were used. The suggestion that the available letters between "B" and "H" were saved for later models may be true (or may not). It may be that they were mostly trying to avoid duplicates, including letters that were used as modifiers, such as "D", "S", and "V". If they had simply gone with "A", "B", "C", "D" for the 1939 introductions, there would have been a "DD", and they may have not wanted anything with the same letter repeated. If you go through the whole alphabet and include the modifiers, they didn't leave many unused.

The "K" serial number prefix on the M suggests it was originally going to be a model "K" (pure conjecture). Maybe they changed it because the "K" series trucks were coming along a little later. Two new models with the same letter (even with one general line and the other truck) would have certainly caused confusion.

This is probably a fruitless discussion.
 
I think I read some place that they tried to choose letters that would be less likely to be confused with other letter when corresponding on paper. (i.e. every ones handwriting is not perfect) so it would avoid
confusion on order forms when dealers where ordering new tractors. Kind of like them not using certain letters for casting codes
 
In the green world, aka John Deere, they were making the D, and then came out with the C. They had such a problem with phone
calls, that they changed quickly the C to GP.
 

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