The same results as to inventions may be reached in different but less pleasant ways: When all the industries are absorbed by huge combinations of capital the strife of competition among individuals, and the making of individual inventions to meet such competition, will greatly disappear. Or, the same results may be effected by stringent laws of labour organisations, in restricting or repressing all individual independent effort, prescribing what shall be done or what shall not be done along certain lines of manufacture or employment. So that the progress of future inventions depends on the outcome of the great economic, industrial, and social battles which are now looming on the pathway of the future.
But what the inventions of the nineteenth century were and what they have done for Humanity, is a chapter that must be read by all those now living or to come who wish to learn the history of their race. It is a story which gathers up all the threads of previous centuries and weaves them into a fabric which must be used in all the coming ages in the attainment of their comforts, their adornments, and their civilisations.
To enumerate all the inventions of the century would be like calling up a vast army of men and proclaiming the name of each. The best that can be done is to divide the wide field into chapters, and in these chapters give as best one may an idea of the leading inventions that have produced the greatest industries of the World.
CHAPTER II.
AGRICULTURE AND ITS IMPLEMENTS.
The Egyptians were the earliest and greatest agriculturists, and from them the art was learned by the Greeks. Greece in the days of her glory greatly improved the art, and some of her ablest men wrote valuable treatises on its different topics. Its farmers thoroughly ploughed and fertilised the soil, used various implements for its cultivation, paid great attention to the raising of fruits,—the apple, pear, cherry, plum, quince, peach, lemon, fig and many other varieties suitable to their climate, and improved the breeds of cattle, horse and sheep. When, however, social pride and luxurious city life became the dominant passions, agriculture was left to menials, and the art gradually faded with the State. Rome in her best days placed farming in high regard. Her best writers wrote voluminously on agricultural subjects, a tract of land was allotted to every citizen, which was carefully cultivated, and these citizen farmers were her worthiest and most honoured sons. The condition and needs of the soil were studied, its strength replenished by careful fertilisation, and it was worked with care. There were ploughs which were made heavy or light as the different soils required, and there were a variety of farm implements, such as spades, hoes, harrows and rakes. Grains, such as wheat, barley, rye and oats, were raised, a variety of fruits and vegetables, and great attention paid to the breeding of stock. Cato and Varro, Virgil and Columella, Pliny and Palladius delighted to instruct the farmer and praise his occupation.
But as the Roman Empire grew, its armies absorbed its intelligent farmers, the tilling of the soil was left to the menial and the slave, and the Empire and agriculture declined together.
Then came the hordes of northern barbarians pouring in waves over the southern countries and burying from sight their arts and civilisation. The gloom of the middle ages then closed down upon the European world. Whatever good may have been accomplished in other directions by the crusades, agriculture reached its lowest ebb, save in those instances where the culture of the soil received attention from monastic institutions.
The sixteenth century has been fixed upon as the time when Europe awoke from its long slumber. Then it was after the invention of the printing press had become well established that publications on agriculture began to appear. The Boke of Husbandrie, in 1523, by Sir Anthony Fitzherbert; Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry; Barnaby Googe’s The Whole Art of Husbandry; The Jewel House of Art and Nature, by Sir Hugh Platt; the English Improver of Walter Blithe, and the writings of Sir Richard Weston on the husbandry of Brabant and Flanders, were the principal torches by which the light on this subject was handed down through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Further awakening was had in the eighteenth century, the chief part of which was given by Jethro Tull, an English agriculturist, who lived, and wrote, and laboured in the cause between 1680 and 1740. Tull’s leading idea was the thorough pulverisation of the soil, his doctrines being that plants derived their nourishment from minute particles of soil, hence the need of its pulverisation. He invented and introduced a horse hoe, a grain drill, and a threshing machine.
Next appeared Arthur Young, of England, born in 1741, whose life was extended into the 19th century, and to whom the world was greatly indebted for the spread of agricultural knowledge. He devoted frequent and long journeys to obtaining information on agricultural subjects, and his writings attracted the attention and assistance of the learned everywhere. His chief work was the making known widely of the beneficial effects of ammonia and ammoniacal compounds on vegetation. Many other useful branches of the subject, clearly treated by him, are found in his Annals of Agriculture. It was this same Arthur Young with whom Washington corresponded from his quiet retreat at Mount Vernon. After the close of the War of Independence in 1783 and before the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 and his elevation to the Presidency in that year, Washington devoted very much of his time to the cultivation of his large estate in Virginia. He took great interest in every improvement in agriculture and its implements. He invented a plough and a rotary seed drill, improved his harrows and mills, and made many inquiries relative to the efficacy of ploughs and threshing machines made in England and other parts of Europe. It was during this period that he opened an interesting correspondence with Young on improvements in agriculture, which was carried on even while he was President, and he availed himself of the proffer of Young’s services to fill an order for seeds and two ploughs from a London merchant. He also wrote to Robert Cary & Co., merchants in London, concerning an engine he had heard of as being constructed in Switzerland, for pulling up trees and their stumps by the roots, and ordered one to be sent him if the machine were efficient.
Jefferson, Washington’s great contemporaneous statesman and Virginia planter, and to whom has been ascribed the chief glory of the American patent system, himself also an inventor, enriched his country by the full scientific knowledge he had gained from all Europe of agricultural pursuits and improvements.
The progress of the art, in a fundamental sense, that is in a knowledge of the constituents, properties, and needs of the soil, commenced with the investigations of Sir Humphry Davy at the close of the 18th century, resulting in his celebrated lectures before the Board of Agriculture from 1802 to 1812, and his practical experiments in the growth of plants and the nature of fertilisers. Agricultural societies and boards were a characteristic product of the eighteenth century in Europe and America. But this birth, or revival of agricultural studies, the enthusiastic interest taken therein by its great and learned men, and all its valuable publications and discoveries, bore comparatively little fruit in that century. The ignorance and prejudice of the great mass of farmers led to a determined, and in many instances violent resistance to the introduction of labour-saving machinery and the practical application of what they called “book-farming.” A fear of driving people out of employment led them to make war upon new agricultural machines and their inventors, as they had upon weaving and spinning inventions. This war was more marked in England than elsewhere, because there more of the new machines were first introduced, and the number of labourers in those fields was the greatest. In America the ignorance took the milder shape of contempt and prejudice. Farmers refused, for instance, to use cast-iron ploughs as it was feared they would poison the soil.
So slow was the invention and introduction of new devices, that if Ruth had revisited the earth at the beginning of the nineteenth century, she might have seen again in the fields of the husbandmen everywhere the sickle of the reapers behind whom she gleaned in the fields of Boaz, heard again the beating on the threshing floor, and felt the old familiar rush of the winnowing wind. Cincinnatus returning then would have recognised the plough in common use as about the same in form as that which he once abandoned on his farm beyond the Tiber.
But with the spread of publications, the extension of learning, the protection now at last obtained and enforced for inventions, and with the foundations laid and the guide-posts erected in nearly every art and science by previous discoverers, inventors and writers, the century was now ready to start on that career of inventions which has rendered it so glorious.
As the turning over and loosening of the sod and the soil for the reception of seed was, and still is the first step in the art of agriculture, the plough is the first implement to be considered in this review.
A plough possesses five essential features,—a frame or beam to which the horses are attached and which is provided with handles by which the operator guides the plough, a share to sever the bottom of a slice of land—the furrow—from the land beneath, a mould board following the share to turn the furrow over to one side, and a landside, the side opposite the mould board and which presses against the unploughed ground and steadies the plough. To these have been commonly added a device called the coulter, which is a knife or sharp disk fastened to the frame in advance of the share and adapted to cut the sod or soil so that the furrow may be more easily turned, an adjustable gauge wheel secured to the beam in advance of the coulter, and which runs upon the surface of the soil to determine by the distance between the perimeter of the wheel at the bottom and the bottom of the plough share the depth of the furrow, and a clevis, which is an adjustable metal strap attached to the end of the beam to which the draught is secured, and by which the pitch of the beam and the depth and width of the furrow are regulated. The general features, the beam, handles, and share, have existed in ploughs from the earliest ages in history. A plough with a metal share was referred to by the prophecy of Isaiah seven centuries before Christ, “They shall beat their swords into plough-shares;” and such a plough with the coulter and gauge wheel added is found in the Caylus collection of Greek antiquities. The inventions of centuries in ploughs have proceeded along the lines of the elements above enumerated.
The leading features of the modern plough with a share and mould board constructed to run in a certain track and turn its furrows one over against the other, appear to have originated in Holland in the 18th century, and from there were made known to England. James Small of Scotland wrote of and made ploughs having a cast-iron mould board and cast and wrought iron shares in 1784-85.
In America, about the same time, Thos. Jefferson studied and wrote upon the proper shape to be given to the mould board.
Charles Newbold in 1797 took out the first patent in the United States for a plough—all parts cast in one piece of solid iron except the beam and handles.
It is a favourite idea with some writers and with more talkers, that when the necessity really arises for an invention the natural inventive genius of man will at once supply it. Nothing was more needed and sought after for thirty centuries among tillers of the soil than a good plough, and what finally supplied it was not necessity alone, but improved brains. Long were the continued efforts, stimulated no doubt in part by necessity, but stimulated also by other motives, to which allusion has already been made, and among which are the love of progress, the hope of gain, and legislative protection in the possession of inventive property.
The best plans of writers and inventors of the eighteenth century were not fully developed until the nineteenth, and it can be safely said that within the last one hundred years a better plough has been produced than in all of the thousands of years before. The defects which the nineteenth century’s improvements in ploughs were designed to remedy can best be understood by first realising what was the condition of ploughs in common use when the century opened.
Different parts of the plough, such as the share and coulter, were constructed of iron, but the general practice among farmers was to make the beam and frame, handles and mould board of strong and heavy timber. The beam was straight, long, and heavy, and that and the mould generally hewed from a tree. The mould board on both sides to prevent its wearing out too rapidly was covered with more or less thick plates of iron. The handles were made from crooked branches of trees. “The beam,” it is said, “was set at any pitch that fancy might dictate, with the handles fastened on almost at right angles with it, thus leaving the ploughman little control over his implement which did its work in a very slow and imperfect manner.” It was some such plough that Lord Kames complained about in the Gentleman Farmer in 1768, as being used in Scotland—two horses and two oxen were necessary to pull it, “the ridges in the fields were high and broad, in fact enormous masses of accumulated earth, that could not admit of cross ploughing or cultivation; shallow ploughing universal; ribbing, by which half the land was left untilled, a general practice over the greater part of Scotland; a continual struggle between the corn and weeds for superiority.” As late as 1820 an American writer was making the same complaint. “Your furrows,” he said, “stand up like the ribs of a lean horse in the month of March. A lazy ploughman may sit on the beam and count every bout of his day’s work; besides the greatest objection to all these ploughs is that they do not perform the work well and the expense is enormous for blacksmith work.” It was complained by another that it took eight or ten oxen to draw it, a man to ride upon the beam to keep it on the ground, and a man followed the plough with a heavy iron hoe to dig up the “baulks.”
The improvements made in the plough during the century have had for their object to lessen the great friction between the wide, heavy, ill-formed share and mould board, and the ground, which has been accomplished by giving to the share a sharp clean tapering form, and to the mould board a shape best calculated to turn the furrow slice; to improve the line of draught so that the pull of the team may be most advantageously employed, which has been effected after long trials, study and experiment in the arrangement of beam, clevis and draft rod, setting the coulter at a proper angle and giving the landside a plane and parallel surface; to increase the wear and lessen the weight of the parts, which has been accomplished by ingenious processes in treating the metal of which the parts are composed, and lessening the number of parts; to render the plough easily repairable by casting the parts in sets and numbering them, by which any part may be replaced by the manufacturer without resort to the blacksmith. In short there is no part of the plough but what has received the most careful attention of the inventor. This has been evidenced by the fact that in the United States alone nearly eleven thousand patents on ploughs were issued during the nineteenth century. When it is considered that all the applications for these patents were examined as to their novelty, before the grant of the patent, the enormous amount of study and invention expended on this article can be appreciated. Among the century’s improvements in this line is the use of disks in place of the old shovel blades to penetrate the earth and revolve in contact therewith. Cutting disks are harnessed to steam motors and are adapted to break up at one operation a wide strip of ground. The long-studied problem of employing a gang of ploughs to plough back and forth and successfully operated by steam has been solved, and electricity is now being introduced as a motor in place of steam. Thus millions of broad acres which never would have been otherwise turned are now cultivated. The tired muscle-strained ploughman who homeward plodded his weary way at night may now comfortably ride at his ease upon the plough, while at the same time the beasts that pull it have a lighter load than ever before.
Next to the plough among the implements for breaking, clearing and otherwise preparing the soil for the reception of seed, comes the harrow. From time immemorial it has been customary to arm some sort of a frame with wooden or iron spikes to scratch the earth after the ploughing. But this century has greatly improved the old constructions. Harrows are now found everywhere made in sections to give flexibility to the frame; collected in gangs to increase the extent of operation; made with disks instead of spikes, with which to cut the roots of weeds and separate the soil, instead of merely scratching them. A still later invention, curved spring teeth, has been found far superior to spikes or disks in throwing up, separating and pulverising the soil. A harrow comprising two ranks of oppositely curved trailing teeth is especially popular in some countries. These three distinct classes of harrows, the disk type, the curved spring tooth type, and gangs of sections of concavo-convex disks, particularly distinguish this class of implements from the old forms of previous ages.
CHAPTER III.
AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS.
It is wonderful for how many generations men were contented to throw grain into the air as the Parable relates:
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow, and when he sowed some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: some fell on stony places where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth; and when the sun was up they were scorched; and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns and the thorns sprung up and choked them. But others fell into good ground and brought forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold.”
Here are indicated the defects in depositing the seed that only the inventions of the century have fully corrected. The equal distribution of the seed and not its wide scattering, its sowing in regular drills or planting at intervals, at certain and uniform depths, the adaptation of devices to meet the variations in the land to be planted, and in short the substitution of quick, certain, positive mechanisms for the slow, uncertain, variable hand of man. Not only has the increase an hundredfold been obtained, but with the machines of to-day the sowing and planting of a hundredfold more land has been made possible, the employment of armies of men where idleness would have reigned, and the feeding of millions of people among whom hunger would otherwise have prevailed. Not only did this machinery not exist at the beginning of the century, but the agricultural machines and devices in this line of the character existing fifty years ago are now discarded as useless and worthless.
It is true that, as in the case of the ploughs, attempts had been made through the centuries to invent and improve seeding implements. The Assyrians 500 years B. C. had in use a rude plough in which behind the sharp wooden plough point was fixed a bowl-shaped hopper through which seed was dropped into the furrow, and was covered by the falling back of the furrow upon it. The Chinese, probably before that time, had a wheelbarrow arrangement with a seed hopper and separate seed spouts. In India a drilling hopper had been attached to a plough. Italy claims the honour among European nations of first introducing a machine for sowing grain. It was invented about the beginning of the seventeenth century and is described by Zanon in his Work on Agriculture printed at Venice in 1764. It was a machine mounted on two wheels, that had a seed box in the bottom of which was a series of holes opening into a corresponding number of metal tubes or funnels. At their front these tubes at their lower ends were sharpened to make small furrows into which the seed dropped.
Similar single machines were in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries devised in Austria and England. The one in Austria was invented by a Spaniard, one Don Joseph de Lescatello, tested in Luxembourg in 1662. The inventor was rewarded by the Emperor, recommended to the King of Spain, and in 1663 and 1664 his machines were made and sold at Madrid. The knowledge of this Spaniard’s invention was made known in England in 1699 by the Earl of Sandwich and John Evelyn. Jethro Tull in England shortly after invented and introduced a combined system of drilling, ploughing and cultivating. He sowed different seeds from the same machine, and arranged that they might be covered at different depths. Tull’s machines were much improved by James Cooke, a clergyman of Lancashire, England; and also in the last decade of the eighteenth century by Baldwin and Wells of Norfolk, England.
Washington and others in America had also commenced to invent and experiment with seeding machines. But as before intimated, the nineteenth century found the great mass of farmers everywhere sowing their wheat and other grains by throwing them into the air by hand, to be met by the gusts of wind and blown into hollows and on ridges, on stones and thorny places,—requiring often a second and third repetition of the same tedious process.
In 1878 Mr. Coffin, a distinguished journalist of Boston, in an address before the Patent Committee of the U. S. Senate, set forth the advantages obtained by the modern improvements in seeders as follows:
“The seeder covers the soil to a uniform depth. It sows evenly, and sows a specific quantity. You may graduate it so that, after a little experience, you can determine the amount per acre even to a quart of wheat. They sow all kinds of grain,—wheat, clover, and superphosphate, if need be, at once. They harrow at the same time. They make the crop more certain. It is the united testimony of manufacturers and farmers alike that the crop is increased from one-eighth to one-fourth, especially in the winter wheat. Winter wheat, you are aware, in the freezing and thawing season, is apt to heave out. It is desirable to bury the seed a uniform and proper depth and to throw over the young plant such an amount of soil that it shall not heave with the freezing and thawing. Of the 360,000,000 bushels of wheat raised last year I suppose more than 300,000,000 was winter wheat. One-eighth of this is 37,700,000 bushels.”
It would seem to many that after the adoption of a seed hopper, and spouts with sharpened ends that cut the drill rows in the furrows and deposited the seed therein, that little was left to be done in this class of inventions; but a great many improvements were necessary. Gravity alone could not be depended upon for feeding the seed. Means had to be devised for a continuous and regular discharge from each grain tube; for varying the quantity of the seed fed by varying the escape openings, or by positive mechanical movements variable in speed; for fixing accurately the quantity of seed discharged; for changing the apparatus to feed coarse or fine seed; and for rendering the apparatus efficient on different surfaces—steep hillsides, level plains, irregular lands.
An important step was the substitution of what is called the “force feed” for the gravity feed. There is a variety of devices for this purpose, the principle of one of them being a revolving feed wheel located beneath the hopper, and above each spout, the two casings between which the feed wheel revolves forming the outer walls of a complete measuring channel, or throat, through which the grain is carried by the rotary motion of the wheel, thus providing the means of measuring the seed with as much accuracy as could be done by a small measure. The quantity sown per acre is governed by simply increasing or diminishing the speed of the feed wheel. In one form of device this change of speed is altered by a system of cone gearing. A graduated flow of the seed has also been effected by the employment of a cylinder having a smooth and fluted part working in a cup beneath the hopper with provision for adjustment of the smooth part towards and from the fluted part to cut off or increase the flow.
To avoid the use of a separate apparatus for separate sizes of grain and other seed, the seed holder has been divided into parts—one part for containing wheat, barley and other medium-sized grains, and another for corn, peas and the larger seeds. And as these parts are used on separate occasions, the respective apertures are opened or closed by a sliding bottom and by a single movement of the hand.
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 assembled 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 grass and clover, onion and turnip seed, and delicate seed like rice, are handled and sown by machines without crushing 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 class 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 pass 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 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.
CHAPTER V.
AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS (continued).
When the harvest is ended and the golden stores of grains and fruits are gathered, then the question arises what shall be next done to prepare them for food and for shipment to the distant consumer.
If the cleaning of the grain and separating it from the chaff and dirt are not had in the threshing process, separate machines are employed for fanning and screening.
It was only during the 18th century that fanning mills were introduced; and it is related by Sir Walter Scott in one of his novels that some of his countrymen considered it their religious duty to wait for a natural wind to separate the chaff from the wheat; that they were greatly shocked by an invention which would raise a whirlwind in calm weather, and that they looked upon the use of such a machine as rebellion against God.
As to the grinding of the grain, the rudimentary means still exist, and are still used by rudimentary peoples, and to meet exceptional necessities; these are the primeval hollowed stone and mortar and pestle, and they too were “the mills of the Gods” in Egyptian, Hebrew and Early Greek days: the quern—that is, the upper running stone and the lower stationary grooved one—was a later Roman invention and can be found described only a century or two before the Christian era.
Crude as these means were they were the chief ones used in milling until within a century and a quarter ago.
In a very recent bright work published in London, by Richard Bennett and John Elton, on Corn Mills, etc., they say on this point: “The mill of the last century, that, by which, despite its imperfections, the production of flour rose from one of the smallest to one of the greatest and most valuable industries of the world, was essentially a structure of few parts, whether driven by water or wind, and its processes were exceedingly simple. The wheat was cleaned by a rude machine consisting of a couple of cylinders and screens, and an air blast passed through a pair of mill-stones, running very close together, in order that the greatest amount of flour might be produced at one grinding. The meal was then bolted, and the tailings, consisting of bran, middlings and adherent flour, again sifted and re-ground. It seems probable that the miller of the time had a fair notion of the high grade of flour ground from middlings, but no systematic method of procedure for its production was adopted.”
The upper and the nether mill-stone is still a most useful device. The “dress,” which consists of the grooves which are formed in the meeting faces of the stones, has been changed in many ways to meet the requirements in producing flour in varying degrees of fineness. Machines have been invented to make such grooves. A Swiss machine for this purpose consists of two disks carrying diamonds in their peripheries, which, being put in rapid revolution, cut parallel grooves in the face of the stone.
A great advance in milling was made both in America and Europe by the inventions of Oliver Evans. Evans was born in the State of Delaware, U.S., in 1755, and died in 1819. He was a poor boy and an apprentice to a wheelwright, and while thus engaged his inventive powers were developed. He had an idea of a land carriage propelled without animal power. At the age of 22 he invented a machine for making card teeth, which superseded the old method of making them by hand. Later he invented steam-engines and steam-boats, to which attention will hereafter be called. Entering into business with his brothers within the period extending from 1785 to 1800, he produced those inventions in milling which by the opening of the 19th century had revolutionised the art. A description of the most important of these inventions was published by him in 1795 in a book entitled The Young Millwright and Miller’s Grist. Patents were granted Evans by the States of Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania in 1787, and by the U.S. Government in 1790 and 1808.
As these inventions formed the basis of the most important subsequent devices of the century, a brief statement of his system is proper:
From the time the grain was emptied from the waggon to the final production of the finest flour at the close of the process, all manual labour was dispensed with. The grain was first emptied into a box hung on a scale beam where it was weighed, then run into an elevator which raised it to a chamber over cleaning machines through which it was passed, and reclaimed by the same means if desired; then it was run down into a chamber over the hoppers of the mill-stones; when ground it fell from the mill-stones into conveyors and as carried along subjected to the heated air of a kiln drier; then carried into a meal elevator to be raised and dropped on to a cooling floor where it was met by what is called a hopper boy, consisting of a central round upright shaft revolving on a pivot, and provided with horizontal arms and sweeps adapted to be raised and lowered and turned, by which means the meal was continually stirred around, lifted and turned on the floor and then gathered on to the bolting hoppers, the bolts being cylindrical sieves of varying degrees of fineness to separate the flour from its coarser impurities, and when not bolted sufficiently, carried by a conveyor called a drill to an elevator to be dumped again into the bolting hoppers and be re-bolted. When not sufficiently ground the same drill was used to carry the meal to the grind stones. It was the design of the process to keep the meal in constant motion from first to last so as to thoroughly dry and cool it, to heat it further in the meantime, and to run the machines so slowly as to prevent the rise and waste of the flour in the form of dust.
The Evans system, with minor modifications and improvements, was the prevailing one for three-quarters of a century. New mills, when erected, were provided with this system, and many mills in their quiet retreats everywhere awoke from their drowsy methods and were equipped with the new one.
But the whole system of milling has undergone another great change within the last thirty years:
During that time it has been learned that the coarser portion or kernel of wheat which lies next to the skin of the berry and between the skin and the heart is the most valuable and nutritious part, as it consists largely of gluten, while the interior consists of starch, which when dry becomes a pearly powder. Under the old systems this coarser part, known as middlings, was eliminated, and ground for feed for cattle, or into what was regarded as an inferior grade of flour from which to make coarse bread. It was customary, therefore, under the old method to set the grinding surfaces very close with keen sharp burrs, so that this coarser part was cut off and mixed with the small particles of bran, fine fuzz and other foreign substances, which was separated from the finer part of the kernel by the bolting.
The new process consists of removing the outer skin and adherent impurities from the middlings, then separating the middlings from the central finer part and then regrinding the middlings into flour.
This middlings flour being superior, as stated, to what was called straight grade, it became desirable to obtain as much middlings as possible, and to this end it was necessary to set the grinding surfaces further apart so as to grind high, hence the high milling process as distinguished from low milling. For the better performance of the high rolling process, roller mills were invented. It was found that the cracking process by which the kernel could be cracked and the gluten middlings separated from the starchy heart could best be had by the employment of rollers or cylinders in place of face stones, and at the same time the heating of the product, which injures it, be avoided.
The rollers operate in sets, and successive crackings are obtained by passing and repassing, if necessary, the grain through these rollers, set at different distances apart. The operation on grains of different qualities, whether hard or soft, or containing more or less of the gluten middlings, or starchy parts, and their minute and graded separation, thus are obtained with the greatest nicety.
The Hungarians, the Germans, the Austrians, the Swiss, the English and the Americans have all invented useful forms of these rollers.
This process was accompanied by the invention of new forms of middlings separators and purifiers, in which upward drafts of air are made to pass up through flat, graded shaking bolts, in an enclosed case, by which the bran specks and fuzz are lifted and conveyed away from the shaken material. In some countries, such as the great wheat state of Minnesota, U.S., where the wheat had before been of inferior market value owing to the poorer grade of flour obtained by the old processes, that same wheat was made to produce the most superior flour under the new processes, thus increasing the yearly value of the crops by many millions of dollars.
Disastrous flour dust explosions in some of the great mills at Minneapolis, in 1877-78, developed the invention of dust collectors, by which the suspended particles of flour dust are withdrawn from the machinery and the mill, and the air is cleared for respiration and for the production of the finest flour, while the mill is kept closed and comfortable in cold seasons. One of the latest forms of such a collector has for its essential principle the vertical or rotatory air current, which it is claimed moves and precipitates the finest particles.
The inventions in the class of mills have so multiplied in these latter days, that nearly every known article that needs to be cleaned and hulled, or ground, or cracked or pulverized, has its own specially designed machine. Wind and water as motive powers have been supplanted by steam and electricity. It would be impossible in one volume to describe this great variety. Knight, in his Mechanical Dictionary, gives a list under “Mills,” of more than a hundred distinct machines and processes relating to grinding, hulling, crushing, pulverising and mixing products.
Vegetable Cutters.—Modern ingenuity has not neglected those more humble devices which save the drudgery of hand work in the preparation of vegetables and roots for food for man and beasts, and for use especially when large quantities are to be prepared. Thus, we find machines armed with blades and worked by springs and a lever, for chopping, others for cutting stalks, other machines for paring and slicing, such as apple and potato parers and slicers, others for grating and pulping, others for seeding fruits, such as cherries and raisins, and an entire range of mechanisms, from those which handle delicately the tenderest pod and smallest seed, to the ponderous machines for cutting and crushing the cane in sugar making.
Pressing and Baling.—The want of pressing loose materials and packing bulky ones, like hay, wool, cotton, hops, etc, and other coarser products, into small, compact bales and bodies, to facilitate their transportation, was immediately felt on the great increase of such products in the century.
From this arose pressing and baling machines of a great variety, until nearly every agricultural product that can be pressed, packed or baled has its special machine for that operation. Besides those above indicated relating to agricultural products, we have cane presses, cheese presses, butter presses, cigar and tobacco presses, cork presses, and flour packers, fruit and lard presses, peat presses, sugar presses and others. Leading mechanical principles in presses are also indicated by name, as screw presses, toggle presses, beater press, revolving press, hydraulic press, rack and pinion press, and rolling pressure press and so on.
There are the presses also that are used in compressing cotton. When it is remembered that cotton is raised in about twenty different countries, and that the cotton crop of the United States of 1897-98 was 10,897,857 bales, of about 500 lbs. each; of India, (estimated) for the same period, 2,844,000, of 400 lbs each; of China about 1,320,000, of 500 lbs each, and between two and three million bales in the other countries, it is interesting to consider how the world’s production of this enormous mass of elastic fibre, amounting to seventeen or eighteen million bales, of four and five hundred pounds each, is compressed and bound.
The screw press was the earliest form of machine used, and then came the hydraulic press. Later it has been customary to press the cotton by screw presses or small hydraulic presses at the plantation, bind it with ropes or metal bands and then transport it to some central or seaboard station where an immense establishment exists, provided with a great steam-operated press, in which the bale from the country is placed and reduced to one-fourth or one-third its size, and while under pressure new metallic bands applied, when the bale is ready for shipment. This was a gain of a remarkable amount of room on shipboard and on cars, and solved a commercial problem. But now this process, and the commercial rectangular bale, seem destined to be supplanted by roller presses set up near the plantations themselves, into which the cotton is fed directly from the gin, rolled upon itself between the rollers and compressed into round bales of greater density than the square bale, thus saving a great amount of cost in dispensing with the steam and hydraulic plants, with great additional advantages in convenience of handling and cost of transportation.
It is so arranged also that the cotton may be rolled into clean, uniform dense layers, so that the same may be unwound at the mill and directly applied to the machines for its manufacture into fabrics, without the usual tedious and expensive preliminary operations of combing and re-rolling.
It has also remained for the developed machine of the century to convert hay into an export commodity to distant countries by the baling process. Bale ties themselves have received great attention from inventors, and the most successful have won fortunes for their owners.
Most ingenious machines have been devised for picking cotton in the fields, but none have yet reached that stage of perfection sufficient to supplant the human fingers.
Fruits and Foods.—To prepare and transport fruits in their natural state to far distant points, while preserving them from decay for long times, is, in the large way demanded by the world’s great appetites, altogether a success of modern invention.
To gather the fruit without bruising by mechanical pickers, and then to place the fruit, oranges for instance, in the hands of an intelligent machine which will automatically, but delicately and effectually, wrap the same in a paper covering, and discharge them without harm, are among the recent inventive wonders. In the United States alone 67 patents had been granted up to 1895 for fruit wrapping machines.
Inventions relating to drying and evaporating fruit, and having for their main object to preserve as much as possible the natural taste and colour of the fruit, have been numerous. Spreading the fruit in the air and letting the sun and air do the rest is now a crude process.
These are the general types of drying and evaporating machines:
First, those in which trays of fruit are placed upon stationary ledges within a heated chamber; second, those in which the trays are raised and lowered by mechanical means toward or farther from the source of heat as the drying progresses; third, those in which the fruit is placed in imperforate steam jacketed pans. Many improvements, of course, have been made in detail of form, in ventilation, the supplying and regulating of heat and the moving of trays.
The hermetically sealed glass or earthenware fruit jar, the lids of which can be screwed or locked down upon a rubber band, after the jar is filled and the small remainder of air drawn out by a convenient steam heater, now used by the million, is an illustration of the many useful modern contrivances in this line.
Sterilisation.—In preserving, the desirability of preventing disease and keeping foods in a pure state has developed in the last quarter of a century many devices by which the food is subjected to a steam heat in chambers, and, by devices operated from the outside, the cans or bottles are opened and shut while still within the steam-filled chamber.
Diastase.—By heating starchy matters with substances containing diastase, a partial transformation is effected, which will materially shorten and aid its digestion, and this fact has been largely made use of in the preparation of soluble foods, especially those designed for infants and invalids, such as malted milk and lactated food.
Milkers.—Invention has not only been exercised in the preservation and transportation of milk, but in the task of milking itself. Since 1860 inventors have been seeking patents for milkers, some having tubes operated by air-pumps, others on the same principle in which the vacuum is made to increase and decrease or pulsate, and others for machines in which the tubes are mechanically contracted by pressure plates.