- Thanks to him, Americans began to get short- and long-term weather forecasts, and
projections based on historical averages, carefully compiled by the Smithsonian. Farmers were
greatly assisted by the thoroughness with which the surveyor-general (originally called the
geographer) and his teams worked. The surveyors were not merely geodetic workmen but good
field-geographers, and each was obliged to put into his field-books,at their proper distances, all mines, saltsprings, salt-licks and mill-seats that shall come to his knowledge; and all water- courses, mountains and other remarkable and permanent things, over and near which such lines shall pass, and also the quality of the lands.’ From a surprisingly early stage, considering the sheer size of the Midwest and West, American farmers-and prospectors-got detailed, high- quality maps. Jefferson had spotted the central principle of American agriculture, that it had to be labor- intensive:In Europe the object is to make the most of their land; here it is to make the most of
our labor, land being abundant.' Until about 1800, all that most farmers had were a low-quality,
often hand-made, plow, harrow, hoe, shovel, fork, and rake. Charles Newbould of New Jersey
patented the first American cast-iron plow in 1797. But this was a solid piece, and it was
improved on by Jethro Wood of New York, who patented a metal plow with separate
interlocking parts each of which could be replaced if broken. These advanced metal plows came
into general use in the second half of the 1820s and their impact on productivity was immediate.
They were combined, on virgin land, with steel mold-boards, needed to break up the matted
grasses of the prairies, made from 1833 by John Lane of Chicago. All farmers had got metal
plows by the 1830s. In Pittsburgh two factories were making 34,000 metal plows a year even in
the 1830s and mass manufacturing brought prices down. In 1845 in Massachusetts alone there
were seventy-three plow-making firms producing 61,334 plows plus other implements.
Competition was intense and by 1855 they had merged into twenty-two firms while production
had risen to 152,688 and prices had fallen sharply.
In 1833 Obed Hussey produced the first practical reaper, which could do 15 acres a day. But
he was a poor businessman and it was the genius of Cyrus McCormick (1809-84) which led to
the marketing of the first mass-produced reaper. He was of Ulster origin, who came from
Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley, then to Brockport, New York, on the Erie Canal, to be
nearer the markets, and finally to Chicago in 1848. He was not merely a great inventor but a
remarkable businessman. He sold his first reaper in 1834 and by 1860 was turning out 4,000
machines a year. At the International Exposition in Paris in 1855, to the astonishment of the
Europeans, an American reaper cut an acre of oats in twenty-one minutes, a third of the time
taken by Continental makes. By then there were already 10,000 machines in use on American
farms. Two years later, the United States Agricultural Society held a national trial at the New
York State Fair, entered by forty mowers and reapers. This display showed how far and quickly
American manufacturers had gone in eliminating the bad features, such as side-draft, clogging,
and the inability to get started in standing grain. The quantity of these giant, reliable machines,
made possible by intense competition, explains why American grain was so cheap, outselling all
European products whenever it could get under the tariff and quota barrier, and why production
of large acreages was kept up during the Civil War when the armies took all the young men.
Progress was continual. As early as 1850 American farmer-inventors, after prodigious efforts,
managed to attach a separator to a thresher, so the whole process of threshing and winnowing
could be done by the same machine-the combine was well on its way. The horse hay-rake, doing
the work of ten men, came in during the 1820s, in the 1830s speed-drills for sowing wheat, from
1840 the corn-planter and various types of cultivators. The census of 1860 reported: `By the
marvins-underground-k-12
(Marvins-Underground-K-12)
#1