Ajknu°aUry  19*5™'}  Development  of  the  Sugar  Industry.  21 
In  the  improvement  of  sugar-cane  mills  a  great  amount  of  effort 
has  been  and1  is  still  being  spent.  The  cane  mill  is  one  of  the  most 
fascinating  of  engineering  problems  and  one  which  has  exercised, 
the  ingenuity  of  the  greatest  inventors.  Such  men  as  Henry  Besse- 
mer, the  inventor  of  Bessemer  steel,  and  John  Hyatt,  the  inventor 
of  celluloid,  have  patented  methods  for  crushing  and  grinding  sugar 
cane.  Without  going  into  a  description  of  the  various  inventions, 
it  need  only  be  said  that  the  employment  of  the  steam  engine  and 
the  hydraulic  press  has  enabled  inventors  to  increase  the  grinding 
capacity  of  cane  mills  many  thousand  fold  beyond  that  of  the  old 
ox-driven  machines,  and  with  much  more  efficient  extraction. 
Let  us  now  follow  hastily  the  course  of  sugar  from  the  time  it 
leaves  the  field  until  it  is  bagged  for  shipment,  basing  our  observa- 
FiG.  4. — Harvesting  cane  in  Cuba.5 
tions  on  modern  Cuban  practice.  When  the  sugar  cane  has  reached 
the  proper  stage  of  ripeness,  which  in  Cuba  occurs  in  December,  the 
operation  of  harvesting  begins.  The  cane  is  cut  entirely  by  hand, 
as  shown  in  Fig.  4,  this  first  step  of  the  process  having  undergone 
no  real  change  since  the  industry  began.  Harvesting  by  hand  is 
expensive,  yet  inventors  have  spent  their  lives  and  fortunes  in  efforts 
to  perfect  a  cane  harvester.  The  great  difficulty  lies  in  the  irregular 
growth  of  the  cane,  the  stalks  in  some  cases  being  so  crowded  and 
intertwined  that  the  field  is  an  impassable  jungle.  Consider  also 
the  mechanical  complications  of  a  machine  to  cut  the  cane  close  to 
the  ground,  strip  the  leaves,  and  clip  off  the  green  top,  while  wasting 
none  of  the  valuable  part  of  the  stalk.   Several  inventors  have  almost 
5  This  and  the  following  illustrations  are  from  photographs  by  the  Ameri- 
can Photo  Company,  Havana,  Cuba. 
