THE FIRST HARVESTING MACHINE
To be sure, there is a record of a harvesting machine built in Gaul, while that province was under Roman dominion. Pliny described this machine in 70 A. D. It consisted of an ox cart which was pushed through a field of grain, instead of being pulled by the ox. This cart carried a rack or comb which caught the heads of the standing grain, tearing them off and delivering them into the body of the cart. Unfortunately this primitive, but useful, harvester was not extensively employed and in time it was lost to agriculture. Farmers reverted to the time-honored method of reaping by hand and the ox-pushed machine was forgotten. From time to time in recent years this machine has been reinvented and a machine similar in principle is used to-day to gather clover seed.
The scythe was a distinct improvement over the sickle. It enabled a man to use two hands at the work of reaping instead of one. It provided a much longer and heavier blade, and hence a much broader swath was cut at each stroke. A distinctly American improvement on the scythe is the grain cradle, consisting of a set of fingers above the blade which catch the grain and lay it in a swath at the end of the stroke. This important improvement rapidly spread to all parts of the world and is still used to-day where it is impracticable to use a mechanical reaper. It is claimed that one man can cut and bind more grain with the cradle than three men could with the sickle.