AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS.
If the farmer, toward the close of the 18th century, tired with the
sickle and the scythe for cutting his grass and grain, had looked about
for more expeditious means, he would have found nothing better for
cutting his grass; and for harvesting his grain he would have been
referred to a machine that had existed since the beginning of the
Christian era. This machine was described by Pliny, writing about A. D.
60, who says that it was used on the plains of Rhætia. The same machine
was described by Palladius in the fourth century. That machine is
substantially the machine that is used to-day for cutting and gathering
clover heads to obtain the seed. It is now called a header.
A machine that has been in use for eighteen centuries deserves to be
described, and its inventor remembered; but the name of the inventor has
been lost in oblivion. The description of Palladius is as follows:
“In the plains of Gaul, they use this quick way of reaping, and without
reapers cut large fields with an ox in one day. For this purpose a
machine is made carried upon two wheels; the square surface has boards
erected at the side, which, sloping outward, make a wider space above.
The board on the fore part is lower than the others. Upon it there are a
great many small teeth, wide set in a row, answering to the height of
the ears of corn (wheat), and turned upward at the ends. On the back
part of the machine two short shafts are fixed like the poles of a
litter; to these an ox is yoked, with his head to the machine, and the
yoke and traces likewise turned the contrary way. When the machine is
pushed through the standing corn all the ears are comprehended by the
teeth and cut off by them from the straw and drop into the machine. The
driver sets it higher or lower as he finds it necessary. By a few goings
and returnings the whole field is reaped. This machine does very well in
plain and smooth fields.”
As late as 1786 improvements were being attempted in England on this old
Gallic machine. At that time Pitt, in that country, arranged a cylinder
with combs or ripples which tore off the heads of the grain-stalks and
discharged them into a box on the machine. From that date until 1800
followed attempts to make a cutting apparatus consisting of blades on a
revolving cylinder rotated by the rotary motion of the wheels on which
the machine was carried.
In 1794, a Scotchman invented the grain cradle. Above the blade of a
scythe were arranged a set of fingers projecting from a post in the
scythe snath. This was considered a wonderful implement. A report of a
Scottish Highland Agricultural Society about that time said of this new
machine:
“With a common sickle, seven men in ten hours reaped one and one-half
acres of wheat,--about one-quarter of an acre each. With the new machine
a man can cut one and one-half acres in ten hours, to be raked, bound,
and stacked by two others.”
It was with such crude and imperfect inventions that the farmers faced
the grain and grass fields of the nineteenth century.
The Seven Wonders of the ancient world have often been compared with the
wonders of invention of this present day.
Senator Platt in an address at the Patent Centennial Celebration in
Washington, in 1891, made such a contrast:
“The old wonders of the world were the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon, the Phidian statue of Jupiter, the Mausoleum, the Temple of
Diana at Ephesus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria.
Two were tombs of kings, one was the playground of a petted queen, one
was the habitat of the world’s darkest superstition, one the shrine of a
heathen god, another was a crude attempt to produce a work of art solely
to excite wonder, and one only, the lighthouse at Alexandria, was of the
slightest benefit to mankind. They were created mainly by tyrants; most
of them by the unrequited toil of degraded and enslaved labourers. In
them was neither improvement nor advancement for the people.” With some
excess of patriotic pride, he contrasts these with what he calls “the
seven wonders of American invention.” They were the cotton-gin; the
adaptation of steam to methods of transportation; the application of
electricity to business pursuits; the harvester; the modern
printing-press; the ocean cable; and the sewing machine. “How
wonderful,” he adds, “in conception, in construction, in purpose, these
great inventions are; how they dwarf the Pyramids and all the wonders of
antiquity; what a train of blessings each brought with its entrance into
social life; how wide, direct and far-reaching their benefits. Each was
the herald of a social revolution; each was a human benefactor; each was
a new Goddess of Liberty; each was a great Emancipator of man from the
bondage of labour; each was a new teacher come upon earth; each was a
moral force.”
Of these seven wonders, the harvester and the cotton-gin will only be
described in this chapter. “Harvester” has sometimes been used as a
broad term to cover both mowers and reapers. In a recent and more
restricted sense, it is applied to a machine that cuts grain, separates
it into gavels, and binds it.
The difficulty that confronted the invention of mowers was the
construction, location and operation of the cutting part. To convert the
scythe or the sickle, or some other sharp blade into a fast
reciprocating cutter, to hang such cutter low so that it would cut near
the ground, to protect it from contact with stones by a proper guard, to
actuate it by the wheels of the vehicle, to hinge the cutter-bar to the
frame so that its outer end might be raised, and to arrange a seat on
the machine so that the driver could control the operating parts by
means of a lever, or handles, were the main problems to be solved.
In 1799, Boyce, of England, had a vertical shaft with six rotating
scythes beneath the frame of the implement. This died with the century.
In 1800, Meares, his countryman, tried to adapt shears. He was followed
there, in 1805, by Plucknett, who introduced a horizontal, rotating,
circular blade. Others, subsequently, adopted this idea, both in England
and America. It had been customary, as in olden times, to push the
apparatus forward by a horse or horses hitched behind. But, in 1806,
Gladstone had patented a front draft machine, with a revolving wheel
armed with knife-blades cutting at one side of the machine and a
segment-bar with fingers which gathered the grain and held the straw
while the knife cut it.
Then, in 1807, Salonen introduced vibrating knifes over stationary
blades, fingers to gather grain to the cutters, and a rake to carry the
grain off to one side.
In 1822, Ogle, also of England, was the first to invent the
_reciprocating_ knife-bar. This is the movement that has been given in
all the successful machines since. Ogle’s was a crude machine, but it
furnished the ideas of projecting the cutter-bar at the side of a reel
to gather the grain to the cutter and of a grain platform which was
tilted to drop the sheaf.
The world is indebted also to the Rev. Patrick Bell, of Scotland, who
had invented and built as early as 1823-26, a machine which would cut an
acre of grain in an hour, and is thus described by Knight:
“The machine had a square frame on two wheels which ran loose on the
axle, except when clutched thereto to give motion to the cutters. The
cutter-bar had fixed triangular cutters between each of which was a
movable vibrating cutter, which made a shear cut against the edge of the
stationary cutter, on each side. It had a reel with twelve vanes to
press the grain toward the cutters, and cause it to fall upon a
travelling apron which carried away cut grain and deposited it at the
side of the machine. The reel was driven by bevel-gearing.”
It was used but a few years and then revived again at the World’s Fair
in London, in 1851.
In the United States, inventions in mowers and reapers began to make
their appearance about 1820. In 1822, Bailey was the first to patent a
mowing machine. It was a circular revolving scythe on a vertical axis,
rotated by gearing from the main axle, and so that the scythe was
self-sharpened by passing under a whet-stone fixed on an axis and
revolving with the scythe and was pulled by a horse in front. In 1828,
Lane, of Maine, combined the reaper and thresher. In 1831, Manning had a
row of fingers and a reciprocating knife, and in 1833, Schnebly
introduced the idea of a horizontal endless apron on which the grain
fell, constructed to travel intermittently so as to divide the grain
into separate parts or gavels, and deliver the gavels at one side.
Hussey, of Maryland, in 1833, produced the most useful harvester up to
that time. It had open guard fingers, a knife made of triangular
sections, reciprocating in the guard, and a cutter-bar on a hinged
frame.
Then came the celebrated reaper of McCormick, of Virginia, in 1834, and
his improvements of 1845-1847, and by 1850 he had built hundreds of his
machines. Other inventors, too numerous to mention, from that time
pushed forward with their improvements. Then came many public trials and
contests between rival manufacturers and inventors.
One of the earliest and most notable was the contest at the World’s
Fair, in London, in 1851. This exhibition, the first of the kind the
world had seen, giving to the nations taking part such an astonishing
revelation of each other’s productions, and stimulating in each such a
surprising growth in all the industrial and fine arts, revealed nothing
more gratifying to the lover of his kind than those inventions of the
preceding half-century that had so greatly lifted the farm labourer from
his furrow of drudgery.
Among the most conspicuous of such inventions were the harvesters.
Bell’s machine, previously described, and Hussey’s and McCormick’s were
the principal contesting machines. They were set to work in fields of
grain, and to McCormick was finally awarded the medal of honour.
This contest also opened the eyes of the world to the fact that vast
tracts of idle land, exceeding in extent the areas of many states and
countries, could now be sown and reaped--a fact impossible with the
scythe and the sickle. It was the herald of the admission into the
family of nations of new territories and states, which, without these
machines, would unto this day be still wild wildernesses and trackless
deserts.
This great trial also was followed by many others, State and
International. In 1852, there was in the United States a general trial
of reapers and mowers at Geneva, New York; in 1855, at the French
Exposition, at Paris, where again McCormick met with a triumph; in 1857,
at Syracuse, New York, and subsequently at all the great State and
International Expositions. These contests served to bring out the
failures, and the still-existing wants in this line of machinery. The
earlier machines were clumsy. They were generally one-wheeled machines,
lacked flexibility of parts and were costly. They cut, indeed, vast
tracts of grain and grass, but the machines had to be followed by an
army of men to bind and gather the fallen grain. This army demanded high
wages and materially increased the cost of reaping the crop, and sadly
diminished the profits.
When the Vienna Exposition, in 1873, was held, a great advance was shown
in this and all other classes of agricultural machinery. Reapers and
mowers were lighter in construction, and far less in cost, and stronger
and more effective in every way. The old original machines of McCormick
on which he had worked for twenty years prior to the 1851 triumph, had
been succeeded by another of his machines, on which an additional twenty
years of study, experiment and improvement had been expended. An endless
number of inventors had in the meantime entered the lists. The frame,
the motive gearing, the hinged cutter-bar and knives, the driver’s seat,
the reel, the divider, for separating the swath of grain to be cut from
the uncut, the raising and depressing lever, the self-raker, and the
material of which all the parts were composed had all received the
greatest attention, and now was awaiting the coming of a perfect
mechanical binder that would roll the grain on the machine into a
bundle, automatically bind it, and drop the bound bundles on the ground.
The latter addition came in an incomplete shape to Vienna. The best form
was a crude wire binder. In 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition at
Philadelphia, the mowers and reapers blossomed still more fully, but not
into full fruition; for it was not until two or three years thereafter
that the celebrated _twine_ binders, which superseded the wire, were
fully developed.
Think of the almost miraculous exercise of invention in making a machine
to automatically cut the grain, elevate it to a platform, separate and
roll it into sheaves, seize a stout cord from a reel, wrap it about the
sheaf, tie a knot that no sailor could untie, cut the cord, and throw
the bound sheaf to one side upon the ground!
So great became the demand for this binders’ twine that great
corporations engaged in its manufacture, and they in turn formed a great
trust to control the world’s supply. This one item of twine, alone,
amounted to millions of dollars every year, and from its manufacture
arose economic questions considered by legislators, and serious
litigation requiring the attention of the courts.
At this Centennial Exhibition, besides twenty or more great
manufacturing firms of the United States who exhibited reapers and
mowers, Canada, far-away Australia, and Russia brought each a fine
machine of this wonderful class. And not only these countries, but
nearly all of Europe sent agricultural machines and implements in such
numbers and superior construction that they surpassed the wildest dreams
of the farmer of a quarter of a century before.
Up to this time, about eleven thousand patents have been granted in the
United States, all presumably on separate improvements in mowers and
reapers alone. This number includes, of course, many patents issued to
inventors of other countries.
Before leaving this branch of the subject the lawn-mower should not be
overlooked, with its spiral blades on a revolving cylinder, a hand lever
by which it can be pushed over a lawn and the grass cut as smooth as the
green rug upon a lady’s chamber.
It is the law of inventions that one invention necessitates and
generates another. Thus the vastly increased facilities for cutting
grass necessitated new means for taking care of it when cut. And these
new means were the hay tedder to stir it, the horse hay-rake, the great
hay-forks to load, and the hay-stackers. Harvesters for grass and grain
have been supplemented by Corn, Cotton, Potato and Flax Harvesters.
The threshing-floor still resounds to the flail as the grain is beaten
from the heads of the stalks. Men and horses still tread it out, the
wooden drag and the heavy wain with its gang of wheels, and all the old
methods of threshing familiar to the Egyptians and later among the
Romans may still be found in use in different portions of the world.
Menzies of Scotland, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was the
first to invent a threshing machine. It was unsuccessful. Then came
Leckie, of Stirlingshire, who improved it. But the type of the modern
threshing machine was the invention of a Scotchman, one Meikle, of
Tyningham, East Lothian, in 1786. Meikle threw the grain on to an
inclined board, from whence it was fed between two fluted rollers to a
cylinder armed with blades which beat it, thence to a second beating
cylinder operating over a concave grating through which the loosened
grain fell to a receptacle beneath; thence the straw was carried over a
third beating cylinder which loosened the straw and shook out the
remaining grain to the same receptacle, and the beaten straw was then
carried out of the machine. Meikle added many improvements, among which
was a fan-mill by which the grain was separated and cleaned from both
straw and chaff. This machine, completed and perfected about the year
1800, has seen no departure in principle in England, and in the United
States the principal change has been the substitution of a spiked drum
running at a higher speed for Meikle’s beater drum armed with blades.
In countries like California, says the U.S. Commissioner of Patents in
his report for 1895, “Where the climate is dry and the grain is ready
for threshing as soon as it is cut, there is in general use a type of
machine known as a combined harvester and thresher in which a thresher
and a harvester machine of the header type are mounted on a single
platform, and the heads of grain are carried directly from the harvester
by elevators into the threshing machine, from which the threshed grain
is delivered into bags and is then ready for shipment. Some of these
machines are drawn by horses and some have a portable engine mounted on
the same truck with the harvester propelling the machine, while
furnishing power to drive the mechanism at the same time. Combined
harvesters and threshers have been known since 1836, but they have been
much improved and are now built on a much larger scale.”
Flax-threshers for beating the grain from the bolls of the cured flax
plant, removing the bolls, releasing and cleaning the seed, are also a
modern invention.
Flax and Hemp Brakes, machines by which the woody and cellular portion
of the flax is separated from the fibrous portion, produced in practical
shape in the century, and flanked by the improved pullers, cutters,
threshers, scutchers, hackles, carders, and rovers, have supplanted
Egyptian methods of 3,000 years’ standing, for preparing the flax for
spinning, as well as the crude improvements of the 18th century.
After the foundation of cotton manufacture had been laid “as one of the
greatest of the world’s industries,” in the 18th century by those five
great English inventors, Kay, who invented the fly-shuttle, Hargreaves,
the “Spinning Jenny,” Arkwright, the water-frame, Crompton, the
spinning-mule, and Cartwright, the power-loom, came Eli Whitney in 1793,
a young school teacher from Massachusetts located in Georgia, who
invented the _cotton-gin_. His crude machine, worked by a single person,
could clean more cotton in a single day than could be done by a man in
several months, by hand.
The enormous importance of such a machine began to be appreciated at the
beginning of the century, and it set cotton up as a King whose dominion
has extended across the seas.
Prior to 1871, inventions in this art were mainly directed to perfecting
the structure of this primary gin. By that machine only the long staple
fibre was secured, leaving the cotton seed covered with a short fibre,
which with the seed was regarded as a waste product. To reclaim this
short fibre and secure the seed in condition for use, have been the
endeavours of many inventors during the last twenty years. These objects
have been attained by a machine known as the _delinter_, one of the
first practical forms of which appeared about 1883.
In a bulletin published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1895,
entitled, “Production and Price of Cotton for One Hundred Years,” the
period commences with the introduction of Whitney’s saw gin, and ends
with the year mentioned and with the production in that year of the
largest crop the world had ever seen. No other agricultural crop
commands such universal attention. Millions of people are employed in
its production and manufacture. How insignificant compared with the
wonder wrought by this one machine seems indeed any of the old seven
wonders of the world! Although the displacement of labour occasioned by
the introduction of the cotton-gin was not severely felt, as it was
slave labour, yet that invention affords a good illustration of the fact
that labour-saving machines increase the supply of the article, the
increased supply lowers its price, the lower price increases the demand,
the increased demand gives rise to more machines and develops other
inventions and arts, all of which results in the employment of ten
thousand people to every one thousand at work on the product originally.