Inventions in the Century Part 2

Rubber tubes for conducting the seed through the hollow holes were introduced in place of the metal spouts that answered both as a spout and a hoe.

In place of the common hoe drill of a form used in the early part of the century, the hoes being forced into the soil by the use of levers and weights, what are known as "shoe drills" have largely succeeded. A series of shoes are pivoted to the frame, extend beneath the seed box, and are provided with springs for depressing or raising them.

All kinds of seeds and fertilisers, separately or together, may be now sown, and the broadcast sowing of a larger area than that covered by the throw of the hand can now be given by machinery.

Corn and cotton seed are thus also planted, mixed or unmixed with the fertilising material.

Not only have light ploughs been combined with small seed boxes and one or more seed tubes, for easy work in gardens, but the arrangements varied and graded for different uses until is reached that great machine run by steam power, in which is a.s.sembled a gang of heavy harrows in front to loosen and pulverise the soil, then the seed and fertilising drill of capacious width for sowing the grain in rows, followed by a lighter broad harrow to cover the seed, and all so arranged that the steam lifts the heavy frames on turning, and all controlled easily by the man who rides upon the machine.

In planting at intervals or in hills, as corn and potatoes, and other like larger seeds, no longer is the farmer required to trudge across the wide field carrying a heavy load in bag or box, or compel his boys or women folk to drop the seed while he follows on laboriously with the hoe. He may now ride, if he so choose, and the machine which carries him furnishes the motive power for operating the supply and cut-off of the grain at intervals.

The object of the farmer in planting corn is to plant it in straight lines about four feet apart each way, putting from three to five grains into each spot in a scattered and not huddled condition. These objects are together nicely accomplished by a variety of modern machines.

The planting of great fields of potatoes has been greatly facilitated by machinery that first slices them and then sows the slices continuously in a row, or drops them in separate spots or hills, as may be desired.

The finest seeds, such as gra.s.s and clover, onion and turnip seed, and delicate seed like rice, are handled and sown by machines without crus.h.i.+ng or bruising, and with the utmost exactness. Just what seed is necessary to be supplied to the machine for a given area is decided upon, and the machine distributes the same with the same nicety that a doctor distributes the proper dose of pellets upon the palm of his patient.

Transplanters as well as planters have been devised. These transplanters will dig the plant trench, distribute the fertiliser, set the plant, pack the earth and water the plant, automatically.

The cla.s.s of machines known as cultivators are those only, properly speaking, which are employed to cultivate the plant after the crop is above the ground. The duties which they perform are to loosen the earth, destroy the weeds, and throw the loosened earth around the growing plant.

Here again the laborious hoe has been succeeded by the labour-saving machine.

Cultivators have names which indicate their construction and the crop with which they are adapted to be used. Thus there are "corn cultivators," "cotton cultivators," "sugar-cane cultivators," etc.

Riding cultivators are known as "sulky cultivators" where they are provided with two wheels and a seat for the driver.

If worked between two rows they are termed single, and when between three rows, double cultivators. A riding cultivator adapted to work three rows has an arched axle to pa.s.s over the rows of the growing plants and cultivate both sides of the plants in each row. Double cultivators are constructed so that their outside teeth may be adjusted in and out from the centre of the machine to meet the width of the rows between which they operate. A "walking cultivator" is when the operator walks and guides the machine with the hands as with ploughs. Ordinary ploughs are converted into cultivators by supplying them with double adjustable mould boards. Ingenious arrangements generally exist for widening or narrowing the cultivator and for throwing the soil from the centre of the furrow to opposite sides and against the plant. The depth to which the shares or cultivator blades work in the ground may be adjusted by a gauge wheel upon the draught beam, or a roller on the back of the frame.

Disk cultivators are those in which disk blades instead of ploughs are used with which to disturb the soil already broken. As with ploughs, so with cultivators, steam-engines are employed to draw a gang of cultivating teeth or blades, their framework, and the operator seated thereon, to and fro across the field between two or more rows, turning and running the machine at the end of the rows.

Millet's recent celebrated painting represents a brutal, primitive type of a man leaning heavily on a hoe as ancient and woful in character as the man himself. It is a picture of hopeless drudgery and blank ignorance. Markham, the poet, has seized upon this picture, dwelt eloquently on its horrors, and apostrophised it as if it were a condition now existing. He exclaims,

"O masters, lords and rulers in all lands How will the future reckon with this man?"

The present has already reckoned with him, and he and his awkward implement of drudgery nowhere exist, except as left-over specimens of ancient and pre-historic misery occasionally found in some benighted region of the world.

The plough and the hoe are the chief implements with which man has subdued the earth. Their use has not been confined to the drudge and the slave, but men, the leaders and ornaments of their race, have stood behind them adding to themselves graces, and crowning labor with dignity. Cincinnatus is only one of a long line of public men in ancient and modern times who have served their country in the ploughfield as well as on the field of battle and in the halls of Legislation. We hear the song of the poet rising with that of the lark as he turns the sod.

Burns, lamenting that his share uptears the bed of the "wee modest crimson-tipped flower" and sorrowing that he has turned the "Mousie"

from its "bit o' leaves and stibble" by the cruel coulter. The finest natures, tuned too fine to meet the rude blasts of the world, have shrunk like Cowper to rural scenes, and sought with the hoe among flowers and plants for that balm and strength unfound in crowded marts.

But the dignity imparted to the profession of Agriculture by a few has now by the genius of invention become the heritage of all.

While prophets have lamented, and artists have painted, and poets sorrowed over the drudgeries of the tillers of the soil, the tillers have steadily and quietly and with infinite patience and toil worked out their own salvation. They no longer find themselves "plundered and profaned and disinherited," but they have yoked the forces of nature to their service, and the cultivation of the earth, the sowing of the seed, the nourishment of the plant, have become to them things of pleasurable labour.

With the aid of these inventions which have been turned into their hands by the prolific developments of the century they are, so far as the soil is concerned, no longer "brothers of the ox," but king of kings and lord of lords.

CHAPTER IV.

AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS.

If the farmer, toward the close of the 18th century, tired with the sickle and the scythe for cutting his gra.s.s and grain, had looked about for more expeditious means, he would have found nothing better for cutting his gra.s.s; 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 Rhaetia. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 superst.i.tion, one the shrine of a heathen G.o.d, 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 G.o.ddess of Liberty; each was a great Emanc.i.p.ator 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. .h.i.tched 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 ap.r.o.n 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 pa.s.sing 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 ap.r.o.n 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.