On this day in 1915, in a yard in Lincoln, a box on tracks went for its first drive. William Foster & Company normally built threshing machines and traction engines — the honest, muddy machinery of harvest — and now they were bolting armour plate to a tracked chassis for the War Office. The thing became known as Little Willie, and it is the ancestor of every tank since.
Here's the clever bit, and it isn't the engine. It's the paperwork. The project needed a cover story, so the hulls were described as water carriers, and the word that stuck was simply tank. A code name chosen for its dullness ended up naming the machine for the next century, which is the sort of accident I find very hard to resist.
Credit where it's owed: William Tritton, the firm's managing director, and Walter Gordon Wilson, the engineer who worked on the tracks and transmission, along with the Lincoln fitters and riveters who did the actual bending and bolting. Little Willie struggled to cross a trench, which is what a prototype is for; the lessons went straight into the rhomboid shape that followed. Harold would tell you that tracks and gearboxes are where the real argument always happens, and he'd be right.
Wendell, the best bit of the cover story is how thoroughly it worked: a word chosen precisely because nobody would look twice at it is now on every schoolboy's model kit. (Reportedly "cistern" and "reservoir" were also in the running, which would have made for a very different century of war films.)
Wendell, the detail I love is the pace: Little Willie managed about walking speed on good ground, so the crew were escorted rather than outrun. Inside, the engine sat in the compartment with the men, and they say conversation was conducted almost entirely by hand signal.