Combine Harvester
Traditional grain harvesting required separate cutting, binding, and threshing operations. The mechanical reaper, invented in 1831 by Cyrus McCormick, performed the cutting, but it required that laborers follow the machine in the field to bind the sheaves of grain. After binding, the grain had to be loaded onto wagons and delivered to stationary threshing machines, which separated the grain kernels from the rest of the plant. Binding had to be completed before the reaper could turn around to start a new row. The combine harvester combined the cutting and threshing procedures, eliminating the need to bind the stalks. Combine harvesters were developed almost at the same time as the mechanical reapers. The first patent on a combine was issued to Samuel Lane of Hallowell, Maine, in 1828. His machine was complex and no record exists of it having been actually used. The first successful combine, a horse-drawn machine requiring a team of twenty horses, was invented in 1836 by Hiram Moore and J. Hascall in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The cutter bars and thresher were powered by ground wheels, which meant that the machine had to be moving to perform both functions. In 1854 one of their combines was shipped around South America's Cape Horn to San Francisco. This machine and copies of it were used in the wheat fields of the San Joaquin Valley in California.
During this same period, Australian H. V. McKay built an identical machine, called a stripper, and later made many improvements to it.
McCormick's reapers, though less technically advanced, possessed certain advantages over these early combines. While these combines were successful in the dry climates of Australia and California, the threshing machinery often bogged down in the humidity of the midwestern climate in the United States or in wet conditions. Improvements continued to be made to the combine in the late 1800s. Levelers were added to prevent toppling. Wheels were introduced that could be raised and lowered on rough ground. In 1886 Henry Holt added a link chain that was designed to break in order to prevent a runaway horse from stripping the machine's gears. Most importantly, the thresher was provided with an independent steam power source so it could function while the combine was idle. A prototype self-propelled combine was invented by Daniel Best in 1888. It was not until 1922 that a motorized combine was introduced to the market by Canadian firm Massey-Harris (later Massey-Ferguson), with research assistance provided by the same Australians who had built the earlier combines. The Massey-Harris combine was horse-drawn, but its machinery was driven by a motor.
In 1935 Allis-Chalmers, an American firm, introduced the first totally self-propelled combine. Massey-Harris responded with its own self-propelled combine in 1938, which was widely used in Argentina. In 1944 the first harvest brigades were organized in the United States by Massey-Harris. Men who worked for these brigades migrated during the cutting season from Texas northward across the Great Plains to Canada, harvesting wheat as it ripened. In 1975 the axial combine harvester was introduced. Developed by American firms New Holland and International Harvester, the axial combine threshed the grain with blades rotating in a cylindrical cage. The compact and highly effective axial combine surpassed other combines that only shook the grain loose. This was the most significant improvement to be made to the combine since the addition of the internal combustion engine.
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