Potato Planter Inventor

Early Life

• Dan Albone was born in Biggleswade, a market town on the Ivel River in Bedfordshire, England, in 1860. The youngest of eight children, Albone's life changed on his ninth birthday, when he received a bicycle. He became obsessed with cycling and with the mechanics of bicycles. By the age of 13, he had designed his very own. He began competing in local races.

Cyclist Career

• Throughout his teenage years and into his 20s, Dan Albone competed in numerous cycling competitions and won more than 180 prizes. In 1885, he won the two-mile open in Northamptonshire, which he would also win two years later. Also in 1885, he won London's one-mile open handicap. Albone won the 1888 International Tricycle Scratch Race in the Netherlands. He was a founding member of the North Road Cycling Club.

Inventions

• At the age of 20, Dan Albone founded the Ivel Cycle Works, dedicated to making bicycles both for himself and his friends. In the 1890s, he devoted himself to the invention of motorcars and motorcycles. But it was in 1901 when Albone would achieve international fame with his first tractor design. The following year, Ivel Agricultural Motors Limited was formed. In 1903 and 1904, Albone's tractor designs won the Silver Medal at the Royal Agricultural Show. The potato planter was his final invention. The device used a wheel-and-pulley system attached to a motor that dug holes in the ground into which it subsequently deposited potatoes from an attached bag. It was created just months before his death, and is not considered by his biographers Kathy Hindle and Lee Irvine to be his most important; indeed, the technology became obsolete a few years later.

Death

• Dan Albone had a stroke while talking on the phone at work on October 30, 1906. He died 10 minutes later. Albone was 46 years old. On November 2, he was buried at the Biggleswade cemetery. Obituaries appeared in newspapers throughout Great Britain commemorating the great inventor's life and achievements.