A Bait for Inventors.
I will give $200 for a machine that will bale hay in the field. Rake and press combined would be preferable, but would not object to its taking the hay in the windrow. The machine must be expeditious, executing as fast as a mower is able to cut. Must have sufficient power to make a bale suitable for commercial uses; shape of the bale immaterial; a round one preferred. Must be of light draught; one team is generally all that is available for any machine on the farm. These, with the other qualifications demanded of every machine, simplicity, durability, easy to manage, etc. If such an invention could be produced it would make a revolution in the hay field almost equal to that which the mower has made.
What an awkward, ungainly spectacle a man presents, struggling at one end of a six foot pole, with a ten pound lock of hay at the other end, endeavoring with all his might and main to elevate it 12 or 15 feet on top of a load! It is an insult to human intelligence. A load of loose hay is an uncertain quantity. You are never sure of getting it into the barn. Top heavy, one sided, too wide or too high for the doors; and even with the best of luck, a good percentage has drizzled in the wake of the wagon over the lot to the barn. A 100 or 200 lb. bale, with an inclined plane, or a pulley on side or aft of a good strong rack, and all this barbarism has succumbed to civilization.
At the barn comes a worse servitude. (I don't mean the horse fork; that is a grand lift to civilization. I hope to modify it shortly to throw bales.) There a man struggles with sheer desperation to press by his own avoirdupois 20 tons of hay into a place that won't hold 10. Tramp, tramp, tramp, leg-weary, panting like an overheated dog, every fiber of his clothing saturated with perspiration, a subject worthy of a better immortality than the Greek slave. O Edison! don't fritter away your genius on sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. Elevate the laborer. Liberate our overworked people. Make us a chariot to press our hay.
—Edmund Adams, North Manlius, N. Y., to the New York Tribune.
