In order to give Mr. Gladstone the credit due him, it is proper to say that his reaper, like nine-tenths of the modern harvesting machines, was adapted to be drawn, and not pushed, as the implement of the Gauls was. Its cutting apparatus was extended well to the right, so that the horse drawing it might walk beside the grain to be cut. It was supported upon wheels, one at the outer extremity of the cutting apparatus, and the other substantially in the position now placed in harvesting machines, and his cutting devices were operated by it. His machine was not only adapted to cut the grain, but deliver it at one side in order to make a clear path of travel in cutting the next round.
His machine did not come into use, but was patented and thus made public. Whether practical in detail or not matters little, for he left to the world as a legacy the foundation principles of the reaping machine. Those who followed enriched the art only by additions and modifications.
A second patent was granted to him covering improvements. His machine might leave the grain in almost a continuous swath or in gavels, which depended only upon the number of raking devices applied to his rotary cutting apparatus.
In the patent granted to Salmon, who followed him in 1808, is found a grain receiving platform, differing in no respect from that of the early practical reaper, a cutting apparatus placed at its forward edge, a divider to separate the grain being cut from that left standing, and an orbitally moving rake adapted to remove the grain in gavels to the ground.
SALMON REAPER.
While it is of actual achievements that we shall mainly write, it is well to say that the actual achievement of the reaping machine was accomplished largely from knowledge given us by those early inventors, and it is proper that we point out precisely what they have taught us, for more than thirty machines have been patented in England and America before the machine of Bell, the Scotch preacher, of 1828, was placed upon the market in England.
