AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS. 245 



Adjoining the garden was a field of unripe oats, in which 

 he tried the shears successfully ; but how to reduce this cut- 

 ting principle to practical working, the great difficulty with 

 most inventors, was his next and most serious study. He 

 first prudently made a model to see how it would look and 

 act. Having accomplished this, he next went to work on a 

 machine, all of the woodwork of which he made himself; and 

 he also made patterns of every bit of iron-work, every wheel, 

 rod, bolt and cutters in wood, and sent them at different times 

 and to different places, to have exact copies made by the 

 blacksmith and the founder. These he had to fit up himself 

 with files and chisels, so careful and fearful was he that 

 some one would see or suspect his work. The machine was 

 finally completed, but how was he to try its working power, 

 unseen and unknown? It stood in his workshop, an 

 unoccupied outhouse, long and narrow, with a bench at one 

 end. On a quiet day, when few were about, with a wheel- 

 barrow he covered the floor of the outhouse with about six 

 inches of soil and tramped it firmly ; then, selecting a sheaf of 

 oats from a convenient stack, he stuck straws in the soil about 

 as thick as they would naturally stand if growing ; then going 

 behind his machine he pushed it forward with breathless 

 anxiety, relieved only by seeing the straws perfectly cut. 

 Much yet was to be done to complete it according to his 

 ideas. A reel must be attached, and an endless apron 

 passing over rollers in front to catch and discharge the cut 

 and falling grain. 



These were all finished in the summer of 1828, and, scarcely 

 waiting for the grain to ripen, he, with his brother whom 

 he had taken into confidence, fearful of being seen and ridi- 

 culed, took out the machine and an old horse into a wheat- 

 field about eleven o'clock on a dark night, when every one else 

 was in bed, and after one or two trials they found it to cut 

 the wheat perfectly and to drop it beside the machine ; and 

 they took it back to the shop in a happy frame of mind. 

 This machine cut the srrain on his father's and brother's 

 farms for more than twenty years. Many machines similar 

 were made, but most of them failed from some defect in the 

 manufacture. A similar experience was had in our own 

 State in 1858. 



