Inventions in the Century. Doolittle William Henry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ