Inventions in the Century Part 3

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 princ.i.p.al 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 gra.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s. And not only these countries, but nearly all of Europe sent agricultural machines and implements in such numbers and superior construction that they surpa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al change has been the subst.i.tution 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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, ent.i.tled, "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 ill.u.s.tration 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.ds" 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 pa.s.sed 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 ent.i.tled _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 pa.s.sed, 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 coa.r.s.er 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 coa.r.s.er 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 coa.r.s.er 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 coa.r.s.e bread. It was customary, therefore, under the old method to set the grinding surfaces very close with keen sharp burrs, so that this coa.r.s.er 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 pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing, 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 quant.i.ties 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 coa.r.s.er 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, b.u.t.ter 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 ma.s.s 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.