xxm 



THE GENESIS OF POWER PLOWING 



FOR nearly a century after James Watt had solved the 

 secret of burning fuel to produce power, steam did 

 nothing notable to relieve man's heaviest task, that of 

 turning over the soil each year to produce a crop . Willing 

 inventors were numerous enough, and sheaves of patent claims 

 bore testimony of the efforts made to substitute iron and 

 chemical energy for the plow animal's muscle. Judging from 

 the bulk of the early ideas expressed in this manner, few men 

 had even a faint conception of the enormous forces and resist- 

 ances with which they would have to deal in the solution 

 of the problem. 



The earliest successful application of mechanical power to 

 the plow seems to have been made hi England, about 1850. 

 A portable steam engine and a windlass were then used to wind 

 up a cable attached to what was known as a balance plow, i. e., 

 a wheeled frame carrying two gangs of plows, one right hand and 

 the other left hand, set facing each other. One gang was 

 dropped into the ground and the other tilted out by the same 

 motion, the plow being ready to start immediately on the return 

 journey without being turned around. In order to pull the 

 plow back and forth across the field, the cable was first passed 

 around either a triangle or a quadrangle on pulleys. Two of 

 the pulleys with automatic anchors were moved in parallel 

 paths along opposite sides of the field at right angles to the 

 furrow, the engine remaining stationary. The anchors moved 

 alternately forward the width of the strip plowed, to guide the 



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