A threshing machine or a thresher is a piece of farm equipment that threshes grain, that is, it removes the seeds from the stalks and husks. It does so by beating the plant to make the seeds fall out.
Cyrus Hall McCormick was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which later became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902. Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he and many members of the McCormick family became prominent residents of Chicago. McCormick has been simplistically credited as the single inventor of the mechanical reaper. He was, however, one of several designing engineers who produced successful models in the 1830s. His efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr., with the aid of Jo Anderson, a person enslaved by his family. He also successfully developed a modern company, with manufacturing, marketing, and a sales force to market his products.
Plano is a U.S. city near Aurora in Kendall County, Illinois, with a population of 10,856 at the 2010 census, nearly doubling from its size from 2000. It is part of the Chicago metropolitan area. The city was home to the Plano Harvester Company in the late nineteenth century, as well as the Plano Molding Company more recently. In 2011, downtown Plano was used as a set for Man of Steel.
The modern combined harvester, or simply combine, is a versatile machine designed to efficiently harvest a variety of grain crops. The name derives from its combining four separate harvesting operations—reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing—into a single process. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), sorghum, soybeans, flax (linseed), sunflowers and rapeseed. The separated straw, left lying on the field, comprises the stems and any remaining leaves of the crop with limited nutrients left in it: the straw is then either chopped, spread on the field and ploughed back in or baled for bedding and limited-feed for livestock.
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 reaper that was used in modern-day France during Roman times. The Gallic reaper involved a comb which collected the heads, with an operator knocking the grain into a box for later threshing.
The reaper-binder, or binder, is a farm implement that improved upon the simple reaper. The binder was invented in 1872 by Charles Baxter Withington, a jeweler from Janesville, Wisconsin. In addition to cutting the small-grain crop, a binder also 'binds' the stems into bundles or sheaves. These sheaves are usually then 'shocked' into A-shaped conical stooks, resembling small tipis, to allow the grain to dry for several days before being picked up and threshed.
A swather, or windrower, is a farm implement that cuts hay or small grain crops and forms them into a windrow. "Swather" is predominantly the North American term for these machines. In Australia and other parts of the world, they are called "windrowers". They aid harvesting by speeding up the process of drying the crop down to a moisture content suitable for harvesting and storage.
Mechanised agriculture is the process of using agricultural machinery to mechanise the work of agriculture, greatly increasing farm worker productivity. In modern times, powered machinery has replaced many farm jobs formerly carried out by manual labour or by working animals such as oxen, horses and mules.
William Deering was an American businessman and philanthropist. He inherited a woolen mill in Maine, but made his fortune in later life with the Deering Harvester Company.
Leander James McCormick was an American inventor, manufacturer, philanthropist, and businessman and a member of the McCormick family of Chicago and Virginia. Along with his elder brothers Cyrus and William, he is regarded as one of the fathers of modern agriculture due to his part in the development of the McCormick Reaper and what became the International Harvester Company. He also owned and developed vast amounts of real estate in downtown Chicago and Lake Forest, Illinois. In 1885, he donated one of the world's largest telescopes to the University of Virginia.
The Cyrus McCormick Farm and Workshop is on the family farm of inventor Cyrus Hall McCormick known as Walnut Grove. Cyrus Hall McCormick improved and patented the mechanical reaper, which eventually led to the creation of the combine harvester. The farm is near Steele's Tavern and Raphine, close to the northern border of Rockbridge and Augusta counties in the U.S. state of Virginia, and is currently a museum run by the Virginia Agricultural Experimental Station of Virginia Tech. The museum has free admission and covers 5 acres (2.0 ha) of the initial 532-acre (215.3 ha) farm.
The Avery Company, founded by Robert Hanneman Avery, was an American farm tractor manufacturer famed for its undermounted engine which resembled a railroad engine more than a conventional farm steam engine. Avery founded the farm implement business after the Civil War. His company built a large line of products, including steam engines, beginning in 1891. The company started with a return flue design and later adapted the undermount style, including a bulldog design on the smokebox door. Their design was well received by farmers in central Illinois. They expanded their market nationwide and overseas until the 1920s, when they failed to innovate and the company faltered. They manufactured trucks for a period of time, and then automobiles. until they finally succumbed to an agricultural crisis and the Depression.
Lewis Steward was a U.S. Representative from Illinois. He also co-founded Marsh, Steward & Company, a company that later merged to become International Harvester.
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.
A sheaf (/ʃiːf/) is a bunch of cereal-crop stems bound together after reaping, traditionally by sickle, later by scythe or, after its introduction in 1872, by a mechanical reaper-binder.
Arthur Matthias Beaupre was an American diplomat. He served in several ambassadorships, including Colombia, Argentina, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Cuba.
Stripper was a type of harvesting machine common in Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century. John Ridley is now accepted as its inventor, though John Wrathall Bull argued strongly for the credit.
The Lewis Steward House is a historic residence in Plano, Illinois. It was the home of Lewis Steward, a prominent early settler to Kendall County who co-founded Marsh, Steward & Company, ran for the governorship of Illinois, and was elected to the United States House of Representatives.
William Wallace Marsh was a Canadian American inventor and businessman who co-founded Marsh, Steward & Company with his brother Charles. Born in Ontario, Canada, Marsh developed an early harvester prototype on the family farm in DeKalb County, Illinois, United States. With help from businessman Lewis Steward, Marsh, Steward & Company became an early leader in harvester production. The company later merged with others to form International Harvester. Marsh lived in Sycamore, Illinois from 1873 until his death, serving as a longtime alderman.
