Henry Synck Jr. was an American industrialist who participated in the development of mechanized farming.
Henry Synck Jr. was an American industrialist who participated in the development of mechanized farming.
Henry Synck Jr. was born in Saint Sebastian, Ohio on July 30, 1878. He married Wilhelmina Oppenheim, the daughter of Joseph Oppenheim, a teacher in Maria Stein, Ohio.
In the farming communities of Ohio, fertilization of fields was possible only by the distribution of animal excrement, usually mixed with bedding straw to create a semi-solid mixture of manure. The task of shoveling and distributing the manure was backbreaking and there were many attempts made to mechanize this process. One such example was a patent by a Daniel Merrell in 1886 for a mechanized "manure spreader". [1] There were a number of other patent filings prior to the onset of the 20th century. In 1899 John M Kramer, Fred Heckman and Henry Synck, Jr., all of whom lived in the small farming community of Maria Stein, OH were awarded a patent [2] for a device to spread manure which they named a "manure distributor". Synck subsequently worked with his future father-in-law, Joseph Oppenheim, to develop the first practical manure spreader. Oppenheim's 1900 invention [3] was so successful that it spawned a major manufacturing company, the New Idea Spreader Works, later renamed the New Idea Farm Machinery Company in 1899. New Idea celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1999 as a division of AGCO. [4] Synck's role in the evolution of manure spreader and other farm machinery technology is well documented by a steady stream of patents that not only describe improvements to the manure spreader, but also other farm machinery from 1899 to 1939. [5]
In 1899 Synck's father-in law, Joseph Oppenheim invented the most important component of the first practical mechanical manure spreader. Oppenheim conceived the idea of a practical manure spreader during a game of paddle ball. [6] He noted that "when a player held the paddle-shaped bat at an angle, a foul ball resulted, with the ball careening off at the angle dictated by the paddle. Why not, pondered Oppenheim, make manure do the same thing—fly out at an angle from a series of paddles?" Earlier patent ideas, including that described by Kramer, Heckman and Synck (above) had a distributive mechanism that was flawed in that the width of distribution was relatively narrow. Oppenheim subsequently developed a model from a cigar box and demonstrated the feasibility of distributing manure in a "wide spread pattern". Oppenheim's patent clearly describes the distribution mechanism [3] Manure was loaded into the spreader. A mechanism moved the manure to the rear where it was distributed by paddles.
After months of "trial and error it became obvious he (Oppenheim) had solved the problem of manure spreading...... that he had created a "New Idea"......and that a name and an invention had been born!" Oppenheim died in 1901 and was buried in Maria Stein. Following his death, his wife, Mary Ellerbrock Oppenheim, invested in New Idea and made decisions to move the company forward. The "New Idea Spreader Works" was established and built in Maria Stein. The "New Idea" caught on quickly because it relieved farmers of the back-breaking chore of manually distributing manure from a wagon. Mary Oppenheim died in 1907 [7] New Idea continued to grow and in 1908 the company moved to Coldwater, Ohio, where a railhead existed to ship the completed spreaders. The privately held company was led by BC Oppenheim, Joseph Oppenheim's son. In this closely held family company, Henry Synck remained involved with New Idea as a manager of one of the production units.
By 1918, these children of Joseph and Mary Oppenheim were on record as the persons engaged in the business of the New Idea Spreader Co.: B. C. Oppenheim, J. A. Oppenheim, Theodore Oppenheim (responsible for the development of the two-row corn picker today on display in the Henry Ford Museum), Justin Oppenheim, Wilhelmina Synck (Henry's wife), and Cecilia Selhorst. [8]
Following BC Oppenheim's death, Henry Synck served as President of New Idea. In 1945 the family sold New Idea to Avco, a conglomerate that was subsequently acquired by Textron. In a complicated series of transactions, Textron subsequently divested New Idea to Allied Corporation, another conglomerate (White-New Idea) who subsequently divested [9] it to AGCO Corporation. [10] New Idea has continued to produce a broad spectrum of farm-related machinery. Unfortunately, the Coldwater, Ohio plant was closed in 1999 as the manufacturer sought to reduce costs and consolidate manufacturing in fewer locations. [11]
A reaper is a farm implement or person that reaps crops at harvest when they are ripe. Usually the crop involved is a cereal grass. The first documented reaping machines were Gallic reapers that were used in Roman times in what would become modern-day France. The Gallic reaper involved a comb which collected the heads, with an operator knocking the grain into a box for later threshing.
Massey Ferguson is an agricultural machinery manufacturer, established in 1953 through the merger of farm equipment makers Massey-Harris of Canada and the Ferguson Company of the United Kingdom. It was based in Coventry then moved to Beauvais in 2003 when the Coventry factory was shut down.
AGCO Corporation is an American agricultural machinery manufacturer headquartered in Duluth, Georgia, United States. It was founded in 1990. AGCO designs, produces and sells tractors, combines, foragers, hay tools, self-propelled sprayers, smart farming technologies, seeding equipment, and tillage equipment.
Allis-Chalmers was a U.S. manufacturer of machinery for various industries. Its business lines included agricultural equipment, construction equipment, power generation and power transmission equipment, and machinery for use in industrial settings such as factories, flour mills, sawmills, textile mills, steel mills, refineries, mines, and ore mills.
Henry Drushel Perky was a lawyer, businessman, promoter and inventor. Perky is the inventor of shredded wheat.
Avco Corporation is a subsidiary of Textron, which operates Textron Systems Corporation and Lycoming.
Traditional farming was the original type of agriculture, and has been practiced for thousands of years. All traditional farming is now considered to be "organic farming" although at the time there were no known inorganic methods. For example, forest gardening, a fully organic food production system which dates from prehistoric times, is thought to be the world's oldest and most resilient agroecosystem. The industrial revolution introduced inorganic methods, most of which were not well developed and had serious side effects. An organic movement began in the 1940s as a reaction to agriculture's growing reliance on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The history of this modern revival of organic farming dates back to the first half of the 20th century at a time when there was a growing reliance on these new synthetic, non-organic methods.
White Farm Equipment is a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, now discontinued and owned by AGCO.
Maria Stein is a census-designated place in central Marion Township, Mercer County, Ohio, United States. The community and the Maria Stein Convent lie at the center of the area known as the Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches, where a missionary priest, Father Francis de Sales Brunner, established a number of parishes for German Catholics.
A manure spreader, muck spreader, or honey wagon is an agricultural machine used to distribute manure over a field as a fertilizer. A typical (modern) manure spreader consists of a trailer towed behind a tractor with a rotating mechanism driven by the tractor's power take off (PTO). Truck mounted manure spreaders are also common in North America.
Two-wheel tractor or walking tractor are generic terms understood in the US and in parts of Europe to represent a single-axle tractor, which is a tractor with one axle, self-powered and self-propelled, which can pull and power various farm implements such as a trailer, cultivator or harrow, a plough, or various seeders and harvesters. The operator usually walks behind it or rides the implement being towed. Similar terms are mistakenly applied to the household rotary tiller or power tiller; although these may be wheeled and/or self-propelled, they are not tailored for towing implements. A two-wheeled tractor specializes in pulling any of numerous types of implements, whereas rotary tillers specialize in soil tillage with their dedicated digging tools. This article concerns two-wheeled tractors as distinguished from such tillers.
Michael Joseph Owens was an inventor of machines to automate the production of glass bottles.
The Barns at Nappanee, Home of Amish Acres, formerly known solely as Amish Acres, is a tourist attraction in Nappanee, Indiana, created from an eighty-acre (thirty-two-hectare) Old Order Amish farm. The farm was purchased in October 1968 at auction from the Manasses Kuhns’ estate. The farm was homesteaded by Moses Stahly in 1873. Moses was the son of pioneer Christian Stahly who emigrated from Germany with his widowed mother Barbara and three brothers to the southwest corner of Elkhart County in 1839; making them, perhaps, the earliest Amish settlers in Indiana.
Benjamin Garver Lamme was an American electrical engineer and chief engineer at Westinghouse, where he was responsible for the design of electrical power machines. Lamme created an efficient induction motor from Nikola Tesla's patents and went on to design the giant Niagara Falls generators and motors and the power plant of the Manhattan Elevated Railway in New York City.
The Oliver Farm Equipment Company was an American farm equipment manufacturer from the 20th century. It was formed as a result of a 1929 merger of four companies: the American Seeding Machine Company of Richmond, Indiana; Oliver Chilled Plow Works of South Bend, Indiana; Hart-Parr Tractor Company of Charles City, Iowa; and Nichols and Shepard Company of Battle Creek, Michigan.
John Francis Appleby (1840–1917) was an American inventor who developed a knotting device to bind grain bundles with twine. It became the foundation for all farm grain binding machinery and was used extensively by all the major manufacturers of large grain harvesting machines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Appleby's knotting device was a major landmark in the mechanization of agriculture and aided the development of the western wheat fields of the United States.
James Oliver was an American inventor and industrialist best known for his creation of the South Bend Iron Works, which was reincorporated as the Oliver Farm Equipment Company after his death. After buying a South Bend, Indiana, foundry with partner Harvey Little in 1855 he began experimenting with improved farm plow designs. Driven by the sales of his popular Oliver Chilled Plow, for which he registered 45 patents during his lifetime, the company grew to become one of the largest in Indiana and one of the world's largest producers of farm plows and horse drawn equipment during the late 19th century.
Joseph Oppenheim was an educator who invented the modern widespread manure spreader that made farming less labor-intensive and far more efficient in the early 20th century, and only he is honored for that invention in the Ohio Agricultural Hall of Fame in Columbus, Ohio.
The agricultural machinery industry or agricultural engineering industry is the part of the industry, that produces and maintain tractors, agricultural machinery and agricultural implements used in farming or other agriculture. This branch is considered to be part of the machinery industry.
George Escol Sellers was an American businessman, mechanical engineer, and inventor. He owned and managed different businesses and patented several inventions. He established a company with his brother Charles where he patented his early invention of a machine that produced lead pipes from hot fluid lead continuously. While working for the Panama Railway in the 1850s, he received various patents for improvements he made on railroad locomotives, including a railroad engine which could climb steep hills.