724 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXI. No. 541. 



la., on 'American Machinery as a Factor 

 in Agriculture ' : 



"Farm machinery has made it possible 

 to develop the vast agricultural resources 

 of the country. During the first two hun- 

 dred years after the Pilgrim Fathers set- 

 tled on the American shore, the resources 

 of the country failed to bring about any 

 increase of importance in commerce or in 

 the products of agriculture. As late as 

 1845, people did not raise enough wheat 

 for their bread. With the advent of the 

 steel plow, the self-binding harvester and 

 the steam threshing machine, there was a 

 marked change in the producing power of 

 the American people. Our food supply in- 

 creased from 4.33 bushels of wheat per 

 person in 1845 to 5.50 bushels of wheat in 

 1859 ; to 7.45 bushels in 1869, and as high 

 as ten bushels in 1889. During the same 

 time the population on the farms had de- 

 creased to 80 per cent, in 1850 and 33 per 

 cent, in 1900. The American farmers of 

 to-day with one third the labor of the coun- 

 try produce enough food to support, not 

 only themselves, but the other 67 per cent, 

 that live in the cities, and exported farm 

 products during the year 1904 to the value 

 of the enormous sum of $960,000,000, ac- 

 cording to the United States Secretary's 

 report. This same report states that m 

 1830 it took over three hours' labor to raise 

 one bushel of wheat; in 1896 it took ten 

 minutes. In 1830 the labor in one bushel 

 of wheat cost 17f cents ; in 1896 it cost 3^ 

 cents. In 1850 the labor represented in a 

 bushel of com was four and one half hours, 

 while in 1894 it had been reduced to forty- 

 one minutes. (This has been greatly re- 

 duced since then by the introduction of the 

 more modern corn harvesting machines.) 

 In 1860 it is estimated that the labor in 

 one ton of hay in bales represented 35^ 

 hours, while in 1894 this labor was reduced 

 to 11\ hours, or from a cost of $3.00 in 

 labor to $1.29 in labor. The report esti- 



mates that in the year 1899 the agricultural 

 implements in the United States saved in 

 human labor the sum of $681,471,827. 

 This country is the greatest maker and 

 user of agricultural implements in the 

 world, and this is largely due to the fact 

 that this country is the most prosperous 

 agricultural country in the world. It has 

 enabled the farmer to pay the high price 

 for labor caused by the competition of our 

 manufacture, and has taken away from 

 farm life much of the drudgery and man- 

 ual labor and made it in the best sense an 

 intellectual pursuit. Improvements in 

 machinery have brought about a steady 

 decrease in the cost of production, notwith- 

 standing the steady rise in wages. To 

 give an idea of the vast sums of money 

 invested in farm machinery, take, for in- 

 stance, the following states : Iowa has $57,- 

 960,000 invested; New York, $56,006,000; 

 Pennsylvania, $50,917,240; Illinois, $44,- 

 977,310 ; and Ohio, $36,354,450. The total 

 value of implements on farms in this coun- 

 try is $761,261,000, an average of $133 

 per farm and 90 cents per acre of farm 

 land. The American farmers buy an- 

 nually $100,000,000 of farm implements. 

 New designs of farm machinery are being 

 constantly added, so that the farm ma- 

 chinery is surely the greatest factor in the 

 development of American Agriculture." 



In a paper on 'A Method of Determin- 

 ing the ]\Ioisture Existing in Steam at At- 

 mospheric Pressure,' D. S. Jacobus, pro- 

 fessor of experimental engineering, Stevens 

 Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N. J., 

 illustrated with blue prints and described 

 the method which he had adopted for de- 

 termining the dryness of steam. It con- 

 sisted of mingling a known weight of 

 superheated steam with a known weight of 

 saturated steam at atmospheric pressure. 

 The steam was still superheated after 

 mingling and its temperature was meas- 

 ured. Careful measurements were made to 



