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PITCH TO AMERICA
COMPANIES ATTENDING INPEX® 2008
Celebrating Harvesting Milestones
In They Made America, a book about innovators who helped build America, author Harold Evans paints Cyrus McCormick as an innovative businessman who pioneered practices such as extending credit, providing after-sale service and authorizing agents to sell his products to increase the reach of his business. But Evans notes that none of it would have been possible unless McCormick was first an inventor.
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from the November 2004 issue of InventHelp's free newsletter for inventors |
In 1832, McCormick took the first step in changing the face of harvesting grain forever by putting on a display of his Virginia Reaper, a horse-drawn machine that cut stalks of grain to ready them to be threshed. He harvested six acres that day. While another 10 years would pass before he would earnestly advertise, build and sell the mechanical reaper, the die was cast in a neighbor's wheat field for an improved method of reaping the harvest. According to Evans, "It was not a perfect operation, but he had succeeded where scores of experimenters had failed. Six mechanical elements came to be the essential features of all reapers and they were all embodied in McCormick's 1832 design."
McCormick Harvesting Company led the industry in the development of harvesting equipment by 1854. By 1872 McCormick's reaper incorporated other features including a serrated blade that eased cutting of wet or damp crops, a self raking mechanism and a binding function that tied the cut wheat into bundles for threshing.
Another big step in harvesting technology occurred around the same time as McCormick's 1832 Reaper, that being the threshing machine or thresher, a machine that separates the straw and chaff from the kernels of wheat. Hiram and John Pitts patented a thresher that ran on the power of horses, but the machine was so burdensome that it was impractical for small farmers to own one. Therefore, the practice for a time was to transport threshers around to farming communities where farmers would have their crops threshed.
In
the late 1800's, the final obstacle began to fall: combining
the reaper and the thresher into what would become known as the
combine. A daunting task given that the reaper was a mobile unit,
intended to move around the field and the thresher was immobile
while in use. Initial attempts at creating such a machine met
with modest success. They did the job but needed a team of up
to forty horses to pull it around the field. Since it's
estimated that one horse requires 5 acres of grain to feed it
for a year, 200 acres of grain would be necessary on top of the
cost of the combine, just to operate it.
An Australian, Hugh Victor McKay, invented the first practical combine in 1882. Calling it a "Stripper Harvester," he and his family tested it on their family farm in 1884 and started selling it a year later. By 1891, Mckay renamed it the "Sunshine Harvester" and was importing it across the globe. According to Tomorrow's World, the Australian Initiative, "The machine could strip, thresh, winnow and bag grain in a single operation."
Horse powered machines gave way to self-powered harvesters, threshers and combines once steam and internal combustion engines were light and powerful enough to be practical. Modern combines have continued to improve. Most are adaptable to different crops and contain luxury features like stereo systems, comfortable seats and air conditioning. Some even incorporate pressurized cabins to prevent dust and debris from entering the cabin. Since Thanksgiving was originally a celebration of a bountiful harvest, InventHelp® salutes these early pioneers in harvesting technology.
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