THE GENERAL PURPOSE MOTOR 241 



we have scores of auto plows; we have in England an auto 

 mower; we have in Georgia an auto cultivator; we have auto 

 transplanters and seeders, auto cotton pickers, auto road- 

 rollers, and automatic machines for accomplishing practically 

 every operation. 



The beneficial results of combining operations are: First, 

 to save time; second, by hastening the sequence of crop opera- 

 tions to confine them to the period when the most favorable 

 conditions of soil and climate prevail, and avoid negative 

 action on the soil between successive steps; third, to save trips 

 on the plowed ground; and fourth, to make up a full and 

 economical load for the motor, such as is found in the combina- 

 tions of plows, harrows, disks, seeders, packers, and binders 

 now to be found on our Western prairies. With horses the 

 inability to concentrate power made it necessary to separate 

 operations. With mechanical power there is no reason why we 

 may not look for a recombination of all the various tasks which 

 can take place at or nearly the same time. 



He is a poor prophet who does not ask if in the end the 

 tractor, which is now merely a substitute for what Thomas A. 

 Edison calls the poorest motor ever built, will not be even 

 more. It may combine in one frame a power-producing plant 

 which is more efficient than the horse, and compact working 

 mechanisms which are utterly impossible where the animal 

 is used for power. If plowing were the only task on the farm, 

 or threshing, or yet haying, some of these substitutes for direct 

 traction might even now threaten the continuance of the 

 latter system. No feasible method, however, approaches the 

 use of the independent tractor in economy, simplicity, ver- 

 satility and general efficiency. At present the problem of 

 getting satisfactory machines to attach to the rear of the 

 tractor seems to furnish complications enough, and the next 

 generation will probably come into power before the trac'or's 

 supremacy over an indirect or a combined machine is seriously 

 questioned. 



