“The Balance Sheet of the World” shows that the United States can boast more acres of tillage, in proportion to population, than any other country on the globe; and in grain production, outstrips all competitors. Of such a record every American citizen may well be proud, and it should be remembered that without the genius of Wood such a record could not have been made, even approximately. But in order to a just appreciation of the importance of the modern plow and the usefulness of the inventor of it, one should take a retrospective glance, tracing, as best we may without tedious details, the steps which led from the use of a forked stick to the present implement for fallowing the ground. The Scientific American, which ought to be good authority on such a subject, in speaking of the Wood patent, says: “Previously the plow was a stick of wood plated with iron.” If this does sound like an exaggeration, but is really a plain statement of fact, consider for a moment what the plow really is in its relation to civilization.
The savage lives by the chase and upon the bounty of untilled nature. The first steps toward civilization are to domesticate animals, and cultivate the soil with a rude kind of hoe. Both are alike primitive. The next step is to press the beast into service by supplementing the hoe with a plow. In that implement we see what might be called the original strand in the mighty cord which binds in co-operation man, brute and earth. By means of this agency of agriculture the beast of the field is made to toil, and purchases the benefits of human kindness at the expense of idleness and industry. It is not too much, then, to say that the plow is at once “the tie that binds,” and the tap-root which nourishes the world. If by some miraculous calamity this one implement were forever swept away, universal and unappeasable famine would be inevitable. And that occasional famines of a local character are disappearing from the civilized world, is very largely, if not chiefly, due to the improved tillage resulting from improved plows.
We might well say, in paraphrase of a familiar saying attributed to Napoleon: Let me make the plows of a nation, and I care not who makes their laws.
The primitive plow was and is (for the barbarian of to-day is substantially the same in his agricultural methods as the barbarian of antiquity) simply a forked stick, to which is attached by a strip of rawhide or a wisp of grass, a beast, often the patient cow. As the prong passes over the ground, held down by the bowed form of the poor tiller, it barely scratches the face of the earth.
The first improvement was to reverse the stick and notch the forward end. By that means the animal could be more securely fastened to the plow, the thong being tied around the crotch of the stick. The shorter limb ran along the surface of the ground, the notch in front being the only reliance for stirring the soil. In the absence of a compact turf, such plowing would do a little good in rendering the ground fallow, and would at least have the merit of not being so difficult to operate as its predecessor.
The third plow had three parts. It consisted of a beam, a handle and a share, all constructed by simply trimming the natural wood selected for that purpose. In the first plow the prong which served as a share was slanting, while in the third it rested flatly upon the ground, projecting forward, instead of backward, as in the second plow. It could have required no very difficult search to have found small trees and broken limbs, needing no mechanical skill in fashioning, to render them serviceable for such crude uses. They may be termed nature’s contribution to the art of plow-making.
Without going further into details, it may be stated that a standard authority on the history of mechanism asserts that “the ancient Egyptian, Etruscan, Syrian, and Greek plows, were equal to the modern plows of the south of France, part of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Turkey, Persia, Arabia, India, Ceylon and China; at least such was the case until the middle of the present century.” The Roman and Gallic plows were better than those of the modern countries named. The Gauls had mould-board plows. Pliny is our authority for this statement. That eminent Latin author of eighteen centuries ago, in speaking on the general subject, says:
“Plows are of various kinds. The colter is the iron part which cuts the thick sod before it is broken into pieces and traces beforehand by its incision the future furrows, which the share, reversed, is to open with its teeth. Another kind, the common plowshare, is nothing more than a lever furnished with a pointed beak; while another variety, which is used in light, easy soils, does not present an edge projecting from the share-beam throughout, but only a small point at the extremity. In a fourth kind, again, this point is larger and formed with a cutting edge by the agency of which it cleaves the ground, and by the sharp edges at the side cuts up the weeds by the roots.”
Pliny adds that the broader the plowshare the better it is for turning up the soil. These excerpts from the great Roman may serve to show the utmost reach of invention in that line, until a new impulse, begun in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, was brought to perfect development in the next century by an American citizen who died the poorer for his invention.