An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 81 docx

PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
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In Europe the search for a harvesting machine was also being conducted in
the early years of the nineteenth century, and the Society of Arts offered a prize
for a number of years. Eventually the Revd Patrick Bell designed a machine,
which was built by his local blacksmith and successfully used to harvest corn
in the summer of 1828. Bell decided that his machine was so important that
the restrictions in production that would occur if it was patented should be
avoided. Unfortunately this meant that those imitations that were built were of
poor and uncontrolled quality, and the idea lay dormant for a number of years
owing to the bad reputation they gained.
In the USA, Cyrus McCormick designed a reaper, which he patented in
1834 and put into limited production about the same time (Figure 16.2). While
enjoying considerable success in America, it was some time before it was to
appear in Europe. The incentive was the Great Exhibition held in London in
1851, and more particularly the trials organized that summer by the Royal
Agricultural Society of England. Resistance to the machine was not pure
conservatism, but also had a technical and economic basis. Not least of the
problems was the ridge and furrow drainage system to be found on most of
the heavy lands of Britain, which made it difficult, if not impossible, to operate
the reaper. New drainage techniques being developed at about the same time
were eventually to remove this particular obstacle, but the heavy investment
needed created its own delay.
Figure 16.2: The McCormick reaper, patented in 1834. This machine employed
the essential features of the modern reaper: vibrating sickle-edged blade, fingers
to hold the grain and reel, divider and platform to receive it.
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These early reaping machines merely cut the corn and laid it on the ground for
it to be tied into sheaves by hand, as had occurred with the sickle and scythe.
Several manufacturers had managed to develop machines which would reap the

corn, and also tie it into sheaves. The early machines used wire to bind the
bundles, but in 1880 a farmer-inventor called Appleby produced the first
successful twine binder, using a knotting mechanism that is still found on modern
balers. Appleby’s invention rested on the accumulation of the previous experiences
of a number of people, not least that of William Deering, who was the first to
manufacture the machine. The cutting of corn now became a one-man operation,
but the stocks had still to be stacked in the field to dry, and later to be carted to the
barn for storage. During the winter months the grain had to be threshed from the
straw, and then cleaned or winnowed to remove chaff, weed seeds and any other
light material which might have become mixed up with it.
Threshing and winnowing
Because of the very weak stem that is a characteristic of the primitive cereals
and the wild grass from which they derived, the seeds are easily dispersed.
However the awns that surround the individual seed are very difficult to
remove, and this would have presented problems to the early gatherers of the
wild form, or cultivators of the primitive domestic varieties. As natural and
human induced selection has caused the gradual evolution of these cereals, the
features of most use to the farmer have been favoured. Thus the stem nodes
have become stronger, allowing a considerable amount of rough treatment to
the plant during the course of harvest, without consequent loss of seed. At the
Figure 16.2: The McCormick reaper, patented in 1834. This machine employed
the essential features of the modern reaper: vibrating sickle-edged blade, fingers
to hold the grain and reel, divider and platform to receive it.
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same time species have been developed in which the awns are more readily
removed or, in some cases, completely absent. These benefits have been
achieved at some cost, since the very high disease resistance of the primitive
ancestors such as emmer has been lost, and the protein level of modern grain
is also considerably lower.

Threshing is the process whereby the individual seeds are separated from the
stem of the plant, and also from the awns which surround them. Winnowing is
carried out afterwards to produce a clean sample. Threshing requires a repeated
and vigorous pounding of the corn so as to separate the various parts of the
plant, but without damaging the seed itself. This can be accomplished by
spreading the harvested crop on to a clean piece of ground and driving livestock
over it so that their hooves crush the grain stems, or a device such as the norag
or threshing sledge can be used. Alternatively, human effort can be utilized and
the corn beaten with sticks. These may be just straight sticks, or may be specially
developed flails which allow a greater force to be applied from a more upright
stance. Either way the work is arduous and tedious.
Wild cereal stands are still to be found in certain areas of the Middle East and
Turkey, where they are occasionally harvested. This corn has firstly to be
scorched or parched to make the awns more brittle and easily separated, and the
same practice would have had to have been carried out by the prehistoric food
processor. The changes that occurred as the early domestic species developed
made this process unnecessary, but apart from this the methods employed for
threshing the grain have remained remarkably similar throughout the world and
over several millennia. Occasionally, and in certain parts of the world, reference
may be found to some mechanical device to ease the process, but this has always
been applied on the threshing floor. Where the climate will allow, this is situated
in the open, but in northern Europe the slow winter threshing was conducted in
an area specially set aside in the storage barn.
The first practical threshing machine was invented in 1786 by the Scot
Andrew Meikle (Figure 16.3). It consisted of a revolving drum along the edge
of which were set four slats. The drum turned very close to a rounded mesh
cage, the concave, whose curvature matched very closely the diameter of the
drum. The combined effects of the slats and the pressure induced between the
drum and concave, forced the seeds away from the other parts of the plant.
The design of the Scottish machines required rollers to feed the corn gradually

into the threshing chamber, with the result that the straw was severely
damaged. In 1848, John Goucher in England patented the rasper bar cylinder
which removed the need for these rollers, leaving the straw in a condition
suitable for threshing, and also caused less damage to the seed. The peg tooth
drum was invented in the USA in 1823. The principle employed was similar
to the bars mounted on a drum, but teeth were also introduced to improve the
threshing efficiency. The concept was very popular in America, and was used
also in the newly developing combine harvesters (see pp. 785–6), but in
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Europe, where a higher premium was placed on straw, the rasper bar
predominated, and is still to be seen on modern conventional combine
harvesters.
By 1830 the threshing machine had been readily adopted into northern
Britain, and was also making an appearance in the south. However the southern
labourer depended on threshing during the winter months to provide work
when it was impossible to get on to the land, and a series of riots resulted in the
destruction of a large number of machines and a check in its rate of adoption. In
the north the industrial manufacturing towns were able to offer higher wages
than the farmer, and farm labour was more difficult to recruit. The machine
therefore provided a much needed solution, as it did in other areas of the world
where labour was always in short supply, such as America and Australia. By the
1850s resistance to the thresher had been overcome, and its overall adoption was
speeded by the development of machines which could be driven by portable
steam engines, allowing several farmers to share the capital investment.
Combine harvesters
The ideal harvest machine was of course one which was able to reap, thresh
and clean the corn all in one operation, and this was achieved surprisingly
quickly after the appearance of the first reaper. Hiram Moore’s earliest
machine first ‘cut, threshed, separated, cleaned and sacked’ a field of wheat in

Figure 16.3: Ground plan of Meikle’s thresher from Robert Forsyths ‘Principals
and Practice of Agriculture,’ c. 1805.

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1838 in Michigan, USA, but the success was not immediately followed
through, partly because of wrangles over patent rights, and also because the
machine only worked efficiently on crops that were ripe and dry. When a
further example of Moore’s machine was tried out in California in 1854, it
harvested 600 acres (243 hectares) of wheat in that one season. The 1838
machine cut a width of fifteen feet (4.6m) at each pass, and the developments
that occurred in California followed this pattern. The farmer George Berry, in
the Sacramento Valley, developed a machine with a forty foot (12.2m) cut,
which was operated in the late 1880s, and about the same time another of his
machines, powered by a straw burning steam engine, was the first self-
propelled harvester to be produced. These, and later examples produced by
manufacturers such as Best & Holt, could only have been developed for the
great prairies of America, and apart from the much more compact Australian
machine of the 1840s (see p. 781), there were no developments elsewhere until
the early part of the twentieth century.
By the late 1920s there were half a dozen American manufacturers
producing machines capable of cutting between ten and eighteen feet (3–5.5m)
of corn at one pass. The first of these crossed the Atlantic in 1927, being shown
at the Empire Exhibition in London. The following year two machines were
tried out in Britain, and trials were also conducted in continental Europe. Two
European manufacturers recognized the potential, Clayton & Shuttleworth
beginning production in Britain in 1929, with sales directed at the export
market, and Claas in Germany testing a machine in 1931 which was aimed at
domestic sales. Claas sold some 1400 of these machines over the next ten
years, but generally acceptance in Europe was very slow. There were, for

example, only 120 in Britain by the outbreak of the Second World War. The
depressed state of European agriculture was part of the reason, but there was
also a resistance from the corn merchants, suspicious of the quality of the corn
that resulted from the drying process, which with the combine, became a
necessary addition to the European harvest.
In 1934 the Allis Chalmers company of America introduced their ‘All-Crop’
harvester. With a cutting width of five feet (1.5m), it would be pulled by a low
powered tractor, was ideal for the small farmer, and most important of all, it cost
less than a binder to buy. Within four years it dominated the US market and
ensured that the binder was a machine of the past in that market, outstripping
binder sales in the US by 1936. Since American manufacturers were so powerful
in world markets, this ensured replacement of the binder in overseas markets as
well. The war years had a profound effect on the spread of this machine, and of
farm mechanization generally. On the Continent progress was virtually at a
standstill. In Britain the massive ploughing-up campaign gave a stimulus to the
spread of machinery in much the same way as it had during the First World
War. But British manufacturers were geared to the production of tanks and other
military equipment, and most of the machinery arriving on farms was therefore
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from North America. In America itself, the demands for grain and other
agricultural produce from Britain, Russia and China provided a stimulus for
further mechanization, perhaps most graphically demonstrated by the ‘harvest
brigade’ formed with the new self-propelled combines developed by Massey
Harris. In 1944, 500 machines started harvesting in Texas in March, and
completed over one million acres by September of that year.
Since the war manufacturers have produced ever more sophisticated
machines capable of handling larger acreages and heavier crops, but the
general principle of the machine has remained the same. However, since the
late 1970s many new designs have been tried in the attempt to accommodate

the staggering increases in crop yield that have been achieved in the past
fifteen years.
FARM TRACTION
The establishment of an economy based on plant domestication before one
based on animals does not preclude the domestication and exploitation of a
single species even earlier. French evidence suggests that horses may have been
used from very early times, either as beasts of burden or for riding, on the
basis of a characteristic form of dental wear noticed on a Palaeolithic horse
jawbone. This raises the possibility that European hunter groups were aware of
the potential of horse power well before any attempts were made at plant
cultivation. This in itself was an important step, but much more significant was
to be the utilization of this power for draught. Once again it is the Middle
Eastern sculptures and frescos that provide the earliest evidence for the use of
draught animals. A horse can carry only a limited load on its back, but when
used in harness to pull a wagon it is capable of moving many times this weight.
In the earliest representations it is the now extinct relative of the horse, the
onager, that is most usually portrayed, and then always in association with the
chariot rather than the more humble plough. As a power source for cultivation
the ox predates the horse.
The method of harnessing for the ox is by means of a yoke attached to the
horns, and this place of attachment is still to be found in many parts of the
world today. In Europe this practice gave way to a design of yoke which fitted
across the withers of the animal. The horse’s place in the early history of
traction has traditionally been limited to the chariot and subsequently as an
animal of prestige or war rather than of labour. Various arguments have been
presented to explain this, ranging from the economic ones that the horse was
more expensive to keep, and realized no useful meat at the end of its working
life, to the technical one that it was not until the invention of the horse collar
that the horse’s greater speed and power could be utilized. The collar possibly
originated in China, appearing in Europe by about 1000 AD. Mediaeval

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manuscripts show the horse being used with the harrow, which could only
operate effectively at the greater speed possible with this animal. It is also
occasionally shown in harness with the ox, but hardly ever on its own.
Pictorial and documentary sources both testify to European plough teams of
eight oxen yoked to the plough in four pairs, and it has always been supposed
that these great teams were necessary because of the poor design and heavy
draught of the ploughs being used. More recent work would suggest that the
large teams were more to ensure that each individual animal was lightly
loaded, and could therefore work day in, day out, over a very extended period.
It is likely that the horse was used more in agriculture than surviving records
might imply, even in mediaeval times, but it was nevertheless a gradual process
of replacement that led to the horse predominating in the extended European
scene, and some areas hung on to the use of the ox until animal power was
replaced by the tractor. In each part of the world a suitable animal was chosen
from the native stock: the water buffalo has possibly the widest distribution
after cattle and horses, but the yak, camel and llama were all chosen because of
their suitability to their native environment. South and Central America is
exceptional in that it is the only area in which city states were developed on the
strength of an agricultural system that depended on human muscle alone. In
this region animals were used as beasts of burden, but there is no evidence for
their ever being used for traction.
Animal traction in agriculture is generally associated with the direct traction
of implements on the land, but the invention of effective gearing systems so
important to early industrial development, also had its counterpart on the
farm. Horse wheels had provided power for machinery at least since Roman
times, and in association with water power they were an important means for
driving the fixed equipment of the homestead, such as the corn mill. The
development of the steam engine was to see the displacement of much of this

equipment, but for many smaller farmers animal gears provided a cheap and
reliable power source.
Steam engines by their very construction were of great weight, and fear was
expressed that such weights might cause damage to the structure of the land.
The early pioneers of the internal combustion engine were hampered by the
attitudes of the steam age as well as by the materials and manufacturing
technologies available to them. The early machines, both European and North
American, were therefore built on similar lines to the steam engines they were
to replace, and frequently weighed in excess of four tonnes.
It is therefore not surprising that it was in the drier prairies of North
America, in which there was the need to cultivate huge areas with limited man
and horse power, that the agricultural motor was to be most readily applied. In
Great Britain the pattern of development was being repeated, but one
individual in particular recognized the need for a more compact power source.
Dan Albone, a bicycle maker in Bedfordshire, produced his first machine in
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1902. This motor weighed only 1 1/2 tonnes, and yet was capable of pulling a
two-furrow plough, and later models were capable of three furrows, or of
pulling two binders in tandem. Almost immediately Albone’s Ivel tractor
(Figure 16.4) was being exported to countries on every continent. Albone
himself died in 1906 and without his guidance the company produced no new
ideas of significance; the initiative passed back to the Americans, or to those
companies which were designing and producing for the American market.
Up to the First World War the tractors being produced continued to be of
the size determined by their ancestry. A very large number of companies were
engaged in establishing a position in the market-place, but it was the Ford
company that was to have the greatest impact on future developments. Henry
Ford brought to the problem two important contributions. The first was
technical, in that his tractor was built without a chassis, but with the engine,

gearbox and transmission casings forming the structural strength. The idea
was not new, having first appeared on the Wallis Cub in 1913. However, when
Ford’s mass production manufacturing techniques were applied to the concept,
he was able to market a machine which was not only much lighter than its
rivals, but also significantly cheaper.
As Ford was perfecting his new Fordson tractor, the British government was
implementing a huge ploughing-up campaign to produce the corn necessary to
replace that which was being denied to Britain by the successes of the German
U-boat blockade. They therefore agreed to purchase the first 6000 Fordsons.
Figure 16.4: Ivel tractor pulling two mowers, c. 1905.
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The basic structural design of this machine is to be found on modern
examples. To it have gradually been added a series of new features and also
some which had been invented much earlier, but had never been followed up.
For example, the idea of the power-take-off shaft, which had first appeared on
the British Scott tractor in 1904 and on the French Gougis tractor in 1906, was
reintroduced by the International Harvester company as an optional extra on
their model 8–16 Junior in 1917, and as standard equipment on their 15–30
tractor which appeared in 1921. The power-take-off shaft allowed the power of
the tractor’s engine to be transferred to the machine it was towing. Previous to
this the moving parts of a machine such as a binder were driven via gearing
from its ground wheels. This system was inefficient because of the slip of these
wheels as they rolled on the ground, but it also meant that when a blockage
occurred the machine had to be stopped, and the power that might have
cleared the blockage was therefore not being provided. With the power-take-
off, when the tractor was stopped, the tractor’s engine power could still be
used to drive the equipment concerned.
Most early tractors were merely used as horse replacements to provide the
power to drag a particular implement through or across the ground. However

as early as 1917 the Emerson-Brantingham tractor had a mechanical lift feature
which allowed the direct mounting of specially designed implements. The idea
reappeared in 1929 on the John Deere GP tractor in a mechanical form, and
on the John Deere model ‘A’ in hydraulic form in 1934. At the same time
Harry Ferguson in England was developing a hydraulic system which has
become a standard feature on modern tractors. Ferguson’s system consisted of
three arms to support the rear-mounted implement, the bottom two of which
were raised or lowered by hydraulic pumps, and the top one was connected to
valves which controlled the flow of oil to and from these pumps.
Equipped with this system the implement could be carried by the tractor,
greatly increasing its manoeuvrability compared to the trailed arrangement of its
predecessors. Additionally the top link on the tractor could be set up in such a
way that changes in soil depth or hardness would act on the hydraulic valves so
that the depth of the implement would alter and compensate for the changes
acting on it. Tractor hydraulics have now become extremely sophisticated, and
are used to make running adjustments on both the tractor itself and the
machinery it is towing. Additionally hydraulic pumps are used on equipment
such as combine harvesters as a substitute for transmissions. The advantage of
the system is that, unlike a gearbox, where the range of power selection choices
is determined by the number of gears, the hydraulics system offers a limitless
range of speed.
Pneumatic tyres were issued as standard equipment on the 1935 Allis
Chalmers Model ‘U’, and quickly became a standard fitting on most makes of
tractor in America; their introduction into Europe was delayed by the shortage
of rubber during the war. Pneumatic tyres greatly increased the grip of the
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tractors’ wheels on the soil, allowed greater speeds of operation to be achieved
with more efficient fuel consumption, and also allowed the tractor to be taken
on to the public highway without the time-consuming need to protect the road

from damage by the iron wheels. Their introduction did much to check the
development of tracked crawler tractors, which had appeared very early on the
scene in response to concern about soil damage. Modern low pressure tyres
aim to compensate for the ever increasing size of modern machinery. This
trend itself is in part to maximize capital investment in plant, but it is also an
attempt to reduce the number of passes across a field that are needed to carry
out all the year’s processes. The larger the tractor, the larger the implement it
can carry or pull, and the greater the acreage covered in one trip down the
field. There is a limit to this concept, and while it might have a validity in
many areas of the world, the heavy reliance on petrochemical inputs makes it
unsuitable in others. Animal or human power will always be a vital input into
an agricultural system existing in a situation where the cost or supply of fuel
outstrips the resources available. Indeed, many traditional systems maximize
available resources in a way that is inconceivable within Western technology.
The Indian sacred cow scavenges for its feed at little cost to the community in
which it lives, and yet it provides that community with the calves which will
grow into the draught oxen vital to its existence.
DAIRY FARMING
In terms of returns gained from a given level of input, milking whether of cow,
sheep, goat or horse, is many times more efficient than the production of meat.
As a form of subsistence economy it has the added benefit that in really hard
times the slaughter of a percentage of the herd can provide a satisfactory safety
net. If it is not carried to extremes, the herd can be brought back to a previous
population level reasonably quickly after the return of the good times.
The earliest evidence for milking comes from a fresco from Ubaid in Iraq,
dated to 2500 BC. Later representations from the same area, and also from
Egypt, suggest that milk from sheep and goats was also used. Curiously
shaped pottery sherds discovered at Ghassul in the Jordan valley, in levels
dated to the middle of the fourth millennium, have been identified as butter
churns on the basis of their resemblance to the churns still used today by

Arab nomads. This early processing of milk is important, since it
demonstrates the ability to convert a highly perishable commodity into one
which has some storage potential. Any society which changes its economy
from one based on gathering and hunting, and which may therefore store
little beyond its most immediate needs, will very quickly be faced with the
need to store the products of a bountiful season in order to see it through less
favourable times.