96 tfHE BOOK Ofl WHEAT 



steam was in 1803. The first machines to be successfully 

 placed upon the market were open-cylinder threshers, known 

 under various names, as "chaff-pliers," "bob-tails," "ground- 

 hogs," and "bull-threshers." They simply threshed the grain 

 and did not clean or separate it. H. A. Pitts (1834) success- 

 fully combined the "ground-hog" with the common fanning 

 mill in portable form. He and his brother patented (1837) the 

 original of the great type of "endless apron" or "great belt" 

 separators. 



Threshing machines were first brought into general use in 

 Great Britain. Many were introduced from 1810 to 1820. In 

 the southern counties of England, the machines were the ob- 

 ject of popular attack, and in many districts the farmers were 

 obliged to abandon such as had been erected. Pusey wrote 

 in 1851: "Open air threshing may appear visionary; but it 

 is quite common with the new machinery." The coal burnt by 

 the best engines per horse power per hour was 28 pounds in 

 1847. Four years later it was less than one-fourth as much. 

 Steam was soon universally used for threshing in England. 

 The first "bull-threshers" were used in the United States about 

 1825. They spread rapidly until 1835, when separating devices 

 had been added. Five years later little threshing was done by 

 other means. Horse power was used exclusively, and it was 

 not until about 1876 that steam power began to come into use. 



In Germany there were many lever "hand threshing ma- 

 chines ' ' in use in 1850. Two men worked the lever, and a third 

 fed the grain, but these three laborers could thresh more grain 

 with less labor by using the flail, while the machine also cut up 

 the straw and wheat. 1 By 1872 steam threshing had well begun 

 to drive out other methods of threshing in Germany. In 1854 

 a steam engine of three-horse power threshed 160 bushels of 

 wheat in a day. Similar engines up to nine-horse power ex- 

 isted, and they threshed more grain. An American machine 

 threshed 25 bushels per hour in the early sixties. In 1876 a 

 steam thresher operated by 18 hands threshed well 2,000 bushels 

 of wheat in one day. The bulk of the grain was always quite 

 easily threshed from the straw. The great difficulty was to 

 save the little that was usually left. It was estimated that from 

 5 to 10 per cent of the wheat was left in the straw by hand 

 threshing. 



1 Perels, Bedeutung des Maschinenwesens, pp. 25-27. 



