Graders originated way back in the horse-drawn era, as a simple board mounted on a wheeled frame. In 1885, entrepreneur J D Adams made the grader’s wheels adjustable so they could be cranked to lean against the sideways thrust of the angled blade. This leaning-wheel principle changed the way graders were designed and remains a feature in all graders today. In the early part of the 20th century, steam traction engines gradually replaced animal power to pull graders, then in the1920s tractors with internal combustion engines took over. By that time pull-type graders were a familiar sight maintaining the thousands of miles of gravel roads in North America. In 1919, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company introduced a self-propelled machine which set the stage for Russell and other manufacturers to improve on the self-propelled idea. Eventually all grader makers offered self-propelled models in their lines, even though some offered pull-types as late as the 1950s.
In the 1940s, the number of grader manufacturers shrank to a small number of internationally-known names producing the bulk of the output. In North America, famous grader
