In 1915 World War I was in full swing. Trench warfare had locked all sides into bloody fruitless seeming unending conflict. Russia had been struck especially hard by the brutal breakout of the war, in part because they weren't prepared militarily to face the German military's machine-like precision. And so it was that a Russian Military engineer Nikolay Lebedenko decided to try to build a solution to problem of trench warfare.

Lebdenko reasoned that a vehicle with large enough wheels would simply be able to roll over the trenches and fortifications. He built a prototype of his vehicle and brought it before Nicholas II the Tsar of Russia at the time. Nicholas was fascinated by the vehicle. He and Lebedenko spent hours that day playing with the wind-up model, running it over obstacles like piles of books with ease. Nicholas was so excited by the design that he immediately commissioned Lebedenko to begin work on a full scale prototype of what would eventually become known as the Tsar Tank.

The construction of the prototype took place under incredible secrecy. The parts for the vehicle were sourced from various factories that produced battle ships and other large machines for Russia, but no single factory knew what the parts they were making were for. The budget for the project was 250,000 rubles, an astronomical sum at the time.

Lebedenko and his men assembled the tank in the solitude of the Russian wilderness.

The prototype looked a little like a child's tricycle in reverse. There were two wheels on the front of the Tsar Tank that rose thirty feet off the ground. The wheels were spoked like bicycle wheels. Each wheel was driven by engines the Russians had salvaged from a downed German Zeppelin. The rear of the vehicle was supported by a single, much smaller wheel about five feet in diameter. Mounted on the vehicle's chassis was the body of the tank, a kind of armoured pod that stuck out of the top and bottom of the tricycle body bristling with machine guns that could be used to clear the enemy from the field.

The Tsar tank powered up and began it's maiden trek across the Russian countryside. The 60 ton behemoth rolled easily over the uneven ground, it's huge wheels rolling over a tree in its path and snapping it like a matchstick. The tank then thundered onto what was known as a corduroy road, a road made of logs that had been tied together to keep travelers from sinking into swampy ground. The tank rolled to the end of the corduroy road and off into the swamp.

But once it was off a solid surface the tank ran into trouble. It got stuck in the mud, and when a 60 ton giant tricycle gets stuck in the mud it REALLY gets stuck in the mud. The Russians tried to retrieve the vehicle, but to no avail. The Tsar Tank was dead.

What went wrong? The idea of using two large wheels to cross uneven terrain is not misguided. It's the reason why mountain bikes can go places that skateboards can't. But the Tsar tank's problem was that third wheel. The third wheel rear was much smaller, and there was only one of it, and yet the weight of the Tsar Tank was distributed so that a large portion of the vehicles mass was resting on that single wheel. And when you're talking about 60 tons of tank that's going to be a problem.

Needless to say, the Tsar Tank never made it into combat, but even if it had there likely would have been another problem. The big spoked wheels in the front would have probably been vulnerable to artillery fire, meaning that even if you could work out the weight distribution problem, the vehicle likely wouldn't have survived very long on the battlefield.

Unfortunately the Tsar who commissioned the Tsar Tank didn't survive much longer either. In February of 1917 the Russian people revolted against Nicholas II and killed him and his entire family. In the years that followed Nikolay Lebedenko, the man who engineered the tank would disappear in the chaotic upheaval of the revolution. In 1923 his creating, the single largest military land vehicle ever constructed would be pulled apart and melted down for scrap.