TYING KNOTS BY MACHINE
After the self-raker was introduced the next important improvement was in the binding of the grain. At first the cut grain was raked into a receptacle which was dumped by the driver of the machine when enough had accumulated to form a bundle and the bundles were bound by men following the machine. As in the evolution of the raker, the next step was to provide a platform for these men on the machine so that they could ride as they bound the grain and finally in 1873 a self-binding attachment was invented which increased the efficiency of the machine manifold. This self-binder, however, called for the use of wire which did not meet with favor as a binding material because of the difficulty of cutting it without a special tool. Efforts were therefore made to introduce twine instead. But twine cannot be fastened by mere twisting; it has to be tied and a mechanical means of tying a knot was far from an easy problem to solve. While it is true that the human body is a machine and every movement of which it is capable may be reproduced by mechanical means, the difficulty is to copy many operations without involving such complexity of members as to make the mechanism wholly impracticable. The human hand is really a very intricate piece of mechanism which by long generations of evolution and development has become wonderfully deft. It exhibits this deftness and complexity of movement in tying knots and the very intricacy of this operation was enough to baffle the majority of inventors. There was one inventor, however, who was not to be thwarted even by so formidable an obstacle as this. In 1864 Jacob Behel secured a patent on an attachment for binders which would actually tie a knot. The mechanism passed the twine around the gavel of grain, formed a loop in the two ends, and tied a simple overhand knot in much the same way that the hand ties this knot. Ten years later Marquis L. Gorham improved the mechanism and built a successful twine binder. Finally in 1879 John F. Appleby perfected the binding mechanism, completing the last stage in the development of the modern automatic self-binding reaper.
To keep pace with the reaper, other agricultural machines had to be invented and developed. The vast quantity of grain harvested could not be threshed by hand and the old-fashioned flail had to give way to the steam-driven threshing machine. Finally to meet the requirements of the vast western wheat fields, the combined harvester and thresher was developed which, with a crew of four men, will reap, thresh, and bag between two and three thousand bushels per day. According to statistics of the U. S. Department of Agriculture it took a man three hours and a half to produce a bushel of wheat in 1830 as against ten minutes in 1896. Surely the world owes a tremendous debt to Hussey and particularly to McCormick for introducing machinery into agriculture and starting the train of inventions which in the space of two-thirds of a century have led up to the present remarkable era of machine farming.
There still remains one task of the farmer that has not yet been accomplished with unqualified success by machine. The harvesting of the corn crop is a tedious and disagreeable task and one which the farmer would only too gladly turn over to the machine. To be sure, many corn-harvesting machines have been built and put into service with more or less success, but none has reached the perfection of other classes of agricultural machinery. The difficulty lies not in the machine, but in the fact that corn is so easily beaten down by storms that at harvest time the machine seldom finds the stalks all standing up in nice straight rows. Machines must therefore be provided with means for lifting up the fallen stalks to vertical position. The stalks are cut and bound into bundles and stood up in shocks.
Even more difficult than cutting and binding is the task of husking the corn. This work was always dreaded by farm hands, but now machines are provided to husk the ears and shred the stalks for fodder. Thus the farm is being relieved of its drudgery. Unfortunately it is only the large western farms that can afford to avail themselves of the latest agricultural machinery. On small eastern farms it does not pay to purchase a machine which can be used for only a few weeks in the year and then must be stored away until the next season, but small farmers are now cooperating and clubbing together to buy the less frequently used machines and so even the small farm is being relieved of its drudgery, and the arduous burdens which have always had a tendency to drive young men away from the farm are now being assumed by the unfeeling machine.