I am posting a direct link to a 1940's Era Farm Tractor that starts using a blank shotgun shell. It is not the first engine I've seen using this method, but it is the first farm tractor I've seen, the first being an aircraft in the 1965 film Flight of the Phoenix.
Here is the link to Les Leston's TikTok page with a bunch of other cool old vehicles of various sorts, mostly race cars.