THE GENERAL PURPOSE MOTOR 239 



served the animal's power, and the rotary and reciprocating 

 motions of the harvester, with their loss in delivered power, 

 have been suffered because there seemed no simpler way to 

 produce the necessary results. Inventors still continue, never- 

 theless, to bring out werfd varieties of rotary digging and pul- 

 verizing machines, earth saws, and the like, all designed to 

 overcome the admitted defects of the plow. Most of these 

 have run upon the rock of excessive power consumption. 

 Animals, already scarce, could not be spared to draw them, 

 since they attempted to do the work, not only of the plow, but 

 of the harrow and the other pulverizing implements which 

 follow. The cheaper and highly concentrated power of 

 mechanical tractors has enabled the farmer to combine opera- 

 tions without a heavy cost for maintaining the power 

 plant during idle seasons, and now more and more of 

 these inventions are being brought to light. Few of them 

 are practicable, but they show the trend of thought and the 

 direction in which improvement of moto-culture will undoubt- 

 edly come. 



The constant introduction of freak machines built around 

 a single meritorious idea, now, as in the past, gives the public 

 an unfavorable opinion of mechanical power for tillage. The 

 tractor industry was a long time regaining the public confidence 

 lost during the earlier years of development, when unreliable 

 engines, mounted on unmechanical frames and traction wheels, 

 brought many an early purchaser grief that he published far 

 and wide. So long as inventors exist, and capitalists are 

 willing for the sake of profit to promote the sale of experimen- 

 tal machines, the industry as a whole reaps the notoriety brought 

 about by their failures. Mechanical power, however, is now so 

 firmly established on the farm that its final popularity and 

 general use will not be endangered by these failures, and in- 

 vention along these lines is to be welcomed. The prejudice 

 in favor of the horse is passing. Men have accepted the new 

 order of things, and the problem now is to adapt mechanical 



