The Census of 1920 shows that hardly thirty per cent of the people are
today engaged in agriculture, the basic industry of the United States,
as compared with perhaps ninety per cent when the nation began. Yet
American farmers, though constantly diminishing in proportion to
the whole population, have always been, and still are, able to feed
themselves and all their fellow Americans and a large part of the
outside world as well. They bring forth also not merely foodstuffs, but
vast quantities of raw material for manufacture, such as cotton, wool,
and hides. This immense productivity is due to the use of farm machinery
on a scale seen nowhere else in the world. There is still, and always
will be, a good deal of hard labor on the farm. But invention has
reduced the labor and has made possible the carrying on of this vast
industry by a relatively small number of hands.
The farmers of Washington's day had no better tools than had the
farmers of Julius Caesar's day; in fact, the Roman ploughs were probably
superior to those in general use in America eighteen centuries later.
"The machinery of production," says Henry Adams, "showed no radical
difference from that familiar in ages long past. The Saxon farmer of the
eighth century enjoyed most of the comforts known to Saxon farmers of
the eighteenth."* One type of plough in the United States was little
more than a crooked stick with an iron point attached, sometimes with
rawhide, which simply scratched the ground. Ploughs of this sort were
in use in Illinois as late as 1812. There were a few ploughs designed to
turn a furrow, often simply heavy chunks of tough wood, rudely hewn into
shape, with a wrought-iron point clumsily attached. The moldboard was
rough and the curves of no two were alike. Country blacksmiths made
ploughs only on order and few had patterns. Such ploughs could turn a
furrow in soft ground if the oxen were strong enough--but the friction
was so great that three men and four or six oxen were required to turn a
furrow where the sod was tough.
* "History of the United States", vol. I, p. 16.
Thomas Jefferson had worked out very elaborately the proper curves of
the moldboard, and several models had been constructed for him. He was,
however, interested in too many things ever to follow any one to the
end, and his work seems to have had little publicity. The first real
inventor of a practicable plough was Charles Newbold, of Burlington
County, New Jersey, to whom a patent for a cast-iron plough was issued
in June, 1797. But the farmers would have none of it. They said it
"poisoned the soil" and fostered the growth of weeds. One David Peacock
received a patent in 1807, and two others later. Newbold sued Peacock
for infringement and recovered damages. Pieces of Newbold's original
plough are in the museum of the New York Agricultural Society at Albany.
Another inventor of ploughs was Jethro Wood, a blacksmith of Scipio, New
York, who received two patents, one in 1814 and the other in 1819. His
plough was of cast iron, but in three parts, so that a broken part
might be renewed without purchasing an entire plough. This principle of
standardization marked a great advance. The farmers by this time were
forgetting their former prejudices, and many ploughs were sold. Though
Wood's original patent was extended, infringements were frequent, and he
is said to have spent his entire property in prosecuting them.
In clay soils these ploughs did not work well, as the more tenacious
soil stuck to the iron moldboard instead of curling gracefully away. In
1833, John Lane, a Chicago blacksmith, faced a wooden moldboard with an
old steel saw. It worked like magic, and other blacksmiths followed suit
to such an extent that the demand for old saws became brisk. Then came
John Deere, a native of Vermont, who settled first in Grand Detour, and
then in Moline, Illinois. Deere made wooden ploughs faced with steel,
like other blacksmiths, but was not satisfied with them and studied and
experimented to find the best curves and angles for a plough to be used
in the soils around him. His ploughs were much in demand, and his need
for steel led him to have larger and larger quantities produced for
him, and the establishment which still bears his name grew to large
proportions.
Another skilled blacksmith, William Parlin, at Canton, Illinois, began
making ploughs about 1842, which he loaded upon a wagon and peddled
through the country. Later his establishment grew large. Another John
Lane, a son of the first, patented in 1868 a "soft-center" steel plough.
The hard but brittle surface was backed by softer and more tenacious
metal, to reduce the breakage. The same year James Oliver, a Scotch
immigrant who had settled at South Bend, Indiana, received a patent for
the "chilled plough." By an ingenious method the wearing surfaces of the
casting were cooled more quickly than the back. The surfaces which came
in contact with the soil had a hard, glassy surface, while the body
of the plough was of tough iron. From small beginnings Oliver's
establishment grew great, and the Oliver Chilled Plow Works at South
Bend is today one of the largest and most favorably known privately
owned industries in the United States.
From the single plough it was only a step to two or more ploughs
fastened together, doing more work with approximately the same man
power. The sulky plough, on which the ploughman rode, made his work
easier, and gave him great control. Such ploughs were certainly in
use as early as 1844, perhaps earlier. The next step forward was to
substitute for horses a traction engine. Today one may see on thousands
of farms a tractor pulling six, eight, ten, or more ploughs, doing the
work better than it could be done by an individual ploughman. On the
"Bonanza" farms of the West a fifty horsepower engine draws sixteen
ploughs, followed by harrows and a grain drill, and performs the three
operations of ploughing, harrowing, and planting at the same time and
covers fifty acres or more in a day.
The basic ideas in drills for small grains were successfully developed
in Great Britain, and many British drills were sold in the United States
before one was manufactured here. American manufacture of these drills
began about 1840. Planters for corn came somewhat later. Machines to
plant wheat successfully were unsuited to corn, which must be planted
less profusely than wheat.
The American pioneers had only a sickle or a scythe with which to cut
their grain. The addition to the scythe of wooden fingers, against which
the grain might lie until the end of the swing, was a natural step, and
seems to have been taken quite independently in several places, perhaps
as early as 1803. Grain cradles are still used in hilly regions and in
those parts of the country where little grain is grown.
The first attempts to build a machine to cut grain were made in England
and Scotland, several of them in the eighteenth century; and in 1822
Henry Ogle, a schoolmaster in Rennington, made a mechanical reaper,
but the opposition of the laborers of the vicinity, who feared loss
of employment, prevented further development. In 1826, Patrick Bell, a
young Scotch student, afterward a Presbyterian minister, who had
been moved by the fatigue of the harvesters upon his father's farm in
Argyllshire, made an attempt to lighten their labor. His reaper was
pushed by horses; a reel brought the grain against blades which opened
and closed like scissors, and a traveling canvas apron deposited the
grain at one side. The inventor received a prize from the Highland and
Agricultural Society of Edinburgh, and pictures and full descriptions of
his invention were published. Several models of this reaper were built
in Great Britain, and it is said that four came to the United States;
however this may be, Bell's machine was never generally adopted.
Soon afterward three men patented reapers in the United States: William
Manning, Plainfield, New Jersey, 1831; Obed Hussey, Cincinnati, Ohio,
1833; and Cyrus Hall McCormick, Staunton, Virginia, 1834. Just how much
they owed to Patrick Bell cannot be known, but it is probable that all
had heard of his design if they had not seen his drawings or the machine
itself. The first of these inventors, Manning of New Jersey, drops out
of the story, for it is not known whether he ever made a machine other
than his model. More persistent was Obed Hussey of Cincinnati, who soon
moved to Baltimore to fight out the issue with McCormick. Hussey was an
excellent mechanic. He patented several improvements to his machine and
received high praise for the efficiency of the work. But he was soon
outstripped in the race because he was weak in the essential qualities
which made McCormick the greatest figure in the world of agricultural
machinery. McCormick was more than a mechanic; he was a man of vision;
and he had the enthusiasm of a crusader and superb genius for business
organization and advertisement. His story has been told in another
volume of this series.*
* "The Age of Big Business", by Burton J. Hendrick.
Though McCormick offered reapers for sale in 1834, he seems to have
sold none in that year, nor any for six years afterwards. He sold two in
1840, seven in 1842, fifty in 1844. The machine was not really adapted
to the hills of the Valley of Virginia, and farmers hesitated to buy a
contrivance which needed the attention of a skilled mechanic. McCormick
made a trip through the Middle West. In the rolling prairies, mile after
mile of rich soil without a tree or a stone, he saw his future dominion.
Hussey had moved East. McCormick did the opposite; he moved West, to
Chicago, in 1847.
Chicago was then a town of hardly ten thousand, but McCormick foresaw
its future, built a factory there, and manufactured five hundred
machines for the harvest of 1848. From this time he went on from triumph
to triumph. He formulated an elaborate business system. His machines
were to be sold at a fixed price, payable in installments if desired,
with a guarantee of satisfaction. He set up a system of agencies to
give instruction or to supply spare parts. Advertising, chiefly by
exhibitions and contests at fairs and other public gatherings, was
another item of his programme. All would have failed, of course, if he
had not built good machines, but he did build good machines, and was
not daunted by the Government's refusal in 1848 to renew his original
patent. He decided to make profits as a manufacturer rather than accept
royalties as an inventor.
McCormick had many competitors, and some of them were in the field with
improved devices ahead of him, but he always held his own, either by
buying up the patent for a real improvement, or else by requiring his
staff to invent something to do the same work. Numerous new devices
to improve the harvester were patented, but the most important was an
automatic attachment to bind the sheaves with wire. This was patented in
1872, and McCormick soon made it his own. The harvester seemed complete.
One man drove the team, and the machine cut the grain, bound it in
sheaves, and deposited them upon the ground.
Presently, however, complaints were heard of the wire tie. When the
wheat was threshed, bits of wire got into the straw, and were swallowed
by the cattle; or else the bits of metal got among the wheat itself and
gave out sparks in grinding, setting some mills on fire. Two inventors,
almost simultaneously, produced the remedy. Marquis L. Gorham, working
for McCormick, and John F. Appleby, whose invention was purchased by
William Deering, one of McCormick's chief competitors, invented binders
which used twine. By 1880 the self-binding harvester was complete. No
distinctive improvement has been made since, except to add strength and
simplification. The machine now needed the services of only two men, one
to drive and the other to shock the bundles, and could reap twenty acres
or more a day, tie the grain into bundles of uniform size, and dump them
in piles of five ready to be shocked.
Grain must be separated from the straw and chaff. The Biblical threshing
floor, on which oxen or horses trampled out the grain, was still common
in Washington's time, though it had been largely succeeded by the
flail. In Great Britain several threshing machines were devised in the
eighteenth century, but none was particularly successful. They were
stationary, and it was necessary to bring the sheaves to them. The
seventh patent issued by the United States, to Samuel Mulliken of
Philadelphia, was for a threshing machine. The portable horse-power
treadmill, invented in 1830 by Hiram A. and John A. Pitts of Winthrop,
Maine, was presently coupled with a thresher, or "separator," and this
outfit, with its men and horses, moving from farm to farm, soon became
an autumn feature of every neighborhood. The treadmill was later on
succeeded--by the traction engine, and the apparatus now in common use
is an engine which draws the greatly improved threshing machine from
farm to farm, and when the destination is reached, furnishes the power
to drive the thresher. Many of these engines are adapted to the use of
straw as fuel.
Another development was the combination harvester and thresher used on
the larger farms of the West. This machine does not cut the wheat close
to the ground, but the cutter-bar, over twenty-five feet in length,
takes off the heads. The wheat is separated from the chaff and
automatically weighed into sacks, which are dumped as fast as two expert
sewers can work. The motive power is a traction engine or else twenty to
thirty horses, and seventy-five acres a day can be reaped and threshed.
Often another tractor pulling a dozen wagons follows and the sacks are
picked up and hauled to the granary or elevator.
Haying was once the hardest work on the farm, and in no crop has
machinery been more efficient. The basic idea in the reaper, the
cutter-bar, is the whole of the mower, and the machine developed with
the reaper. Previously Jeremiah Bailey, of Chester County, Pennsylvania,
had patented in 1822 a machine drawn by horses carrying a revolving
wheel with six scythes, which was widely used. The inventions of
Manning, Hussey, and McCormick made the mower practicable. Hazard
Knowles, an employee of the Patent Office, invented the hinged
cutter-bar, which could be lifted over an obstruction, but never
patented the invention. William F. Ketchum of Buffalo, New York, in
1844, patented the first machine intended to cut hay only, and dozens of
others followed. The modern mowing machine was practically developed in
the patent of Lewis Miller of Canton, Ohio, in 1858. Several times as
many mowers as harvesters are sold, and for that matter, reapers without
binding attachments are still manufactured.
Hayrakes and tedders seem to have developed almost of themselves.
Diligent research has failed to discover any reliable information on the
invention of the hayrake, though a horserake was patented as early as
1818. Joab Center of Hudson, New York, patented a machine for turning
and spreading hay in 1834. Mechanical hayloaders have greatly
reduced the amount of human labor. The hay-press makes storage and
transportation easier and cheaper.
There are binders which cut and bind corn. An addition shocks the corn
and deposits it upon the ground. The shredder and husker removes the
ears, husks them, and shreds shucks, stalks, and fodder. Power shellers
separate grain and cobs more than a hundred times as rapidly as a pair
of human hands could do. One student of agriculture has estimated that
it would require the whole agricultural population of the United States
one hundred days to shell the average corn crop by hand, but this is an
exaggeration.
The list of labor-saving machinery in agriculture is by no means
exhausted. There are clover hullers, bean and pea threshers, ensilage
cutters, manure spreaders, and dozens of others. On the dairy farm the
cream separator both increases the quantity and improves the quality of
the butter and saves time. Power also drives the churns. On many farms
cows are milked and sheep are sheared by machines and eggs are hatched
without hens.
There are, of course, thousands of farms in the country where machinery
cannot be used to advantage and where the work is still done entirely or
in part in the old ways.
Historians once were fond of marking off the story of the earth and of
men upon the earth into distinct periods fixed by definite dates. One
who attempts to look beneath the surface cannot accept this easy method
of treatment. Beneath the surface new tendencies develop long before
they demand recognition; an institution may be decaying long before its
weakness is apparent. The American Revolution began not with the Stamp
Act but at least a century earlier, as soon as the settlers realized
that there were three thousand miles of sea between England and the rude
country in which they found themselves; the Civil War began, if not
in early Virginia, with the "Dutch Man of Warre that sold us twenty
Negars," at least with Eli Whitney and his cotton gin.
Nevertheless, certain dates or short periods seem to be flowering times.
Apparently all at once a flood of invention, a change of methods, a
difference in organization, or a new psychology manifests itself. And
the decade of the Civil War does serve as a landmark to mark the passing
of one period in American life and the beginning of another; especially
in agriculture; and as agriculture is the basic industry of the country
it follows that with its mutations the whole superstructure is also
changed.
The United States which fought the Civil War was vastly different
from the United States which fronted the world at the close of
the Revolution. The scant four million people of 1790 had grown to
thirty-one and a half million. This growth had come chiefly by natural
increase, but also by immigration, conquest, and annexation. Settlement
had reached the Pacific Ocean, though there were great stretches of
almost uninhabited territory between the settlements on the Pacific and
those just beyond the Mississippi.
The cotton gin had turned the whole South toward the cultivation of
cotton, though some States were better fitted for mixed farming, and
their devotion to cotton meant loss in the end as subsequent events have
proved. The South was not manufacturing any considerable proportion
of the cotton it grew, but the textile industry was flourishing in
New England. A whole series of machines similar to those used in Great
Britain, but not identical, had been invented in America. American mills
paid higher wages than British and in quantity production were far ahead
of the British mills, in proportion to hands employed, which meant being
ahead of the rest of the world.
Wages in America, measured by the world standard, were high, though
as expressed in money, they seem low now. They were conditioned by the
supply of free land, or land that was practically free. The wages paid
were necessarily high enough to attract laborers from the soil which
they might easily own if they chose. There was no fixed laboring class.
The boy or girl in a textile mill often worked only a few years to save
money, buy a farm, or to enter some business or profession.
The steamboat now, wherever there was navigable water, and the railroad,
for a large part of the way, offered transportation to the boundless
West. Steamboats traversed all the larger rivers and the lakes. The
railroad was growing rapidly. Its lines had extended to more than
thirty thousand miles. Construction went on during the war, and the
transcontinental railway was in sight. The locomotive had approached
standardization, and the American railway car was in form similar to
that of the present day, though not so large, so comfortable, or so
strong. The Pullman car, from which has developed the chair car, the
dining car, and the whole list of special cars, was in process of
development, and the automatic air brake of George Westinghouse was soon
to follow.
Thus far had the nation progressed in invention and industry along the
lines of peaceful development. But with the Civil War came a sudden and
tremendous advance. No result of the Civil War, political or social, has
more profoundly affected American life than the application to the farm,
as a war necessity, of machinery on a great scale. So long as labor
was plentiful and cheap, only a comparatively few farmers could be
interested in expensive machinery, but when the war called the young
men away the worried farmers gladly turned to the new machines and
found that they were able not only to feed the Union, but also to export
immense quantities of wheat to Europe, even during the war. Suddenly the
West leaped into great prosperity. And long centuries of economic and
social development were spanned within a few decades.