268 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Some account of the efforts which have been made in this 

 direction, and the successes and failures which have attended 

 them may not be useless, but may tend to call attention to 

 the subject, indicate the course invention to this end is now 

 pursuing, and what in the way of success or failure may be 

 reasonably expected from the effort. So far as I have been 

 able to ascertain, the first thought or attempt to use steam 

 for the purposes of tillage, was in 1618, when a plan was pre- 

 pared and a patent granted for it in England to David Ramsey 

 and Thomas Wildgosse ; but no machine was constructed, and 

 the idea passed out of mind and remained practically unknown 

 until about 1833, or more than two hundred years. In that 

 year a patent was granted in this country to E. C. Bellinger, 

 of South Carolina, for a hauling steam-plough. Bellinger 

 constructed and tried his machine, but it proved worthless, 

 and all attempts of his to improve it to the point of usefulness 

 failed, and he abandoned the project. But in 1854 John 

 Fowler, of England, adopted Bellinger's general idea, added 

 many improvements of his own, and after constructing his 

 machine was granted patents both in England and the United 

 States, the latter in 1856 and 1857. 



Fowler's first machines were crude in construction and in- 

 efficient in operation ; but he persevered in his attempts at 

 improvement until, after expending more than a quarter of a 

 million of dollars, he so perfected them that they were prac- 

 tically so useful in certain circumstances as to create such a 

 demand for the machines that John Fowler & Co., of Leeds, 

 England, have to this time manufactured and sold nearly three 

 thousand of them. More than five hundred estates in Eno;land 

 are cultivated by them. They have been introduced in France ; 

 there are two hundred of them in the valley of the Nile, and two 

 in this country, — one in Illinois and one on the sugar-plantation 

 of Mr. Lawrence, of Plaquemine, Louisiana. Fowler's is the 

 best type of what is called a hauling-machine. The engine is 

 stationary on the headland of the field, and performs its labor 

 by hauling a gang of five or six ploughs back and forth across 

 the land by means of a rope and windlass secured by an 

 anchor opposite to the engine, or by two engines, one on 

 each side of the land to be ploughed, which in turn haul the 

 ploughs and move forward on the headland as the work pro- 



