An old rusty harvestor
by Jeff Swan
Title
An old rusty harvestor
Artist
Jeff Swan
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
Scottish inventor Patrick Bell invented the reaper in 1826. The combine was invented in the United States by Hiram Moore in 1834. Early versions were pulled by horse, mule or ox teams.[2] In 1835, Moore built a full-scale version and by 1839, over 20 ha (50 acres) of crops were harvested.[3] By 1860, combine harvesters with a cutting, or swathe, width of several metres were used on American farms.[4] Australian Hugh Victor McKay produced a commercially successful combine harvester in 1885, the Sunshine Harvester.[5]
Combines, some of them quite large, were drawn by mule or horse teams and used a bullwheel to provide power. Later, steam power was used, and George Stockton Berry integrated the combine with a steam engine using straw to heat the boiler.[6] At the turn of the twentieth century, horse drawn combines were starting to be used on the American plains and Idaho (often pulled by teams of twenty or more horses).
In 1911, the Holt Manufacturing Company of California produced a self-propelled harvester.[7] In Australia in 1923, the patented Sunshine Auto Header was one of the first center-feeding self-propelled harvesters.[8] In 1923 in Kansas, the Baldwin brothers and their Gleaner Manufacturing Company patented a self-propelled harvester that included several other modern improvements in grain handling.[9] Both the Gleaner and the Sunshine used Fordson engines; early Gleaners used the entire Fordson chassis and driveline as a platform. In 1929 Alfredo Rotania of Argentina patented a self-propelled harvester.[10] International Harvester started making horse-pulled combines in 1915. At the time horse powered binders and stand alone threshing machines were more common. In the 1920s Case Corporation and John Deere made combines and these were starting to be tractor pulled with a second engine aboard the combine to power its workings. The world economic collapse in the 1930s stopped farm equipment purchases thus people largely retained the older method of harvesting. A few farms did invest and used Caterpillar tractors to move the outfits.
Tractor-drawn combines (also called pull-type combines) became common after World War II as many farms began to use tractors. An example was the All-Crop Harvester series. These combines used a shaker to separate the grain from the chaff and straw-walkers (grates with small teeth on an eccentric shaft) to eject the straw while retaining the grain. Early tractor-drawn combines were usually powered by a separate gasoline engine, while later models were PTO-powered. These machines either put the harvested crop into bags that were then loaded onto a wagon or truck, or had a small bin that stored the grain until it was transferred to a truck or wagon with an auger.
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April 27th, 2017
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