STEAM PLOW:
Forerunner of Rural Automation
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The following article is reprinted with permission from Harvest States Journal, October 1986 edition.
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In 1850 Horace Greeley made a special trip to Watertown, New
York to see a portable steam engine power a threshing machine. He
was captivated by the belching monster he saw driving the thresher
and wrote in his Tribune in New York that 'threshing will cease
to be a manual and become a mechanical operation ... and this
engine will be running on wheels and driving a scythe before it, or
drawing a plow behind it, in five years.'
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Greeley prophesied the steam engine boom on the American farm
about 30 years before it started. It wasn't until 1885 that the
boom in self-propelled farm steam engines began, and it was 15
years after that before there were many pulling a plow or reaper
over the fields.
But it wasn't for lack of trying that steam power was not
adapted to agriculture in the 1880's. Even before James Watt in
1769 patented his separate condenser which made the steam engine
practical, inventors were trying to use steam power to mechanize
farming.
The possibility of using a steam engine for farming was
recognized 350 years ago. Englishman David Ramsey in 1630 entered a
patent for 'Making the earth more fertile,' which suggested
steam power could be applied to land transport and to hauling
cultivating implements.
It wasn't until 1836, however, that a practical machine was
used. John Heathcote, a lace manufacturer of Tiverton, England,
patented a stationary engine, which could be driven along the edge
of a field on a primitive crawler-type track. It pulled the plow
across the field with a long rope. But Heathcote and plow designer
Josiah Parkes created their invention for bog reclamation, too
limited a job to arouse much interest.
Twenty-one years later John Fowler of London improved this
system. It won for him in 1858 the Royal Agricultural Society's
long-offered prize of $2,500 for developing a satisfactory method
of plowing by steam. Fowler had what others lacked wire rope which
came along in the 1850's to provide the strength needed to
tackle work in the fields.
Fowler cable and drawbar steam engines were brought into the
United States after the Civil War and were shown across the
country. Few were sold, chiefly because of enormously prohibitive
cost (as much as $30,000 by the time the investment in engine and
tackle was complete) and because these engines were designed to
work in the small English fields.
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