Great Inventions and Discoveries

by Willis Duff Piercy

Besides being a great inventor and successful business man, McCormick was a liberal philanthropist. He gave freely to educational and religious institutions. He died at his home in Chicago, May 13, 1884.

An improved type of the ordinary reaper of McCormick is the self-binder, now in common use, a machine which not only reaps the stalks of grain but binds them together in sheaves.

The most primitive method of threshing grain from the straw was doubtless by beating it with a stick. The ancient Egyptians and Israelites spread out their loosened sheaves upon a circular plot of earth and threshed out the grain by driving oxen back and forth over it. Later a threshing-sledge was dragged over the sheaves. The Greeks and the Romans beat out grain with a stick, trod it out with men or horses, or used the threshing-sledge. The primitive implement for threshing in northern Europe was the stick. A modification of this was the flail, made of two sticks loosely fastened together at one end by means of stout thongs. This implement was used by our ancestors in America and has not yet entirely disappeared from all parts of the world. The threshing machine was invented in 1787 by Andrew Meikle, a Scotchman. Only a few years ago threshing machines were drawn by horses, but of late years they have been moved with self-propelling steam engines, commonly called traction engines.

A remarkable combination machine has come into use recently, particularly in the vast wheat fields of California, eastern Washington, and the West. This machine is drawn by as many as thirty-two horses. At one operation it cuts the grain, threshes it, winnows it, and puts it into bags ready for the market.

Spinning and Weaving Machines

The low, monotonous hum of the spinning-wheel in the old farmhouse on winter evenings, as the housewife spun the yarn which she was afterward to knit into warm stockings for the family, has not entirely passed away from the memory of the older generation of to-day. Thomas Buchanan Read has a pathetic allusion to the old spinning-wheel in one of his best poems, "The Closing Scene." And who has not felt the charm of the spinning-wheel scene in Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish," which pictures John Alden as he sits clumsily holding on his hands the skein which Priscilla winds for knitting.

There are two essential principles in the art of spinning: first, the drawing out of uniform quantities of fiber in a continuous manner; and second, the twisting of the fiber so as to give it coherency and strength. The earliest spinning apparatus, and for ages the only one, was the distaff and spindle. The former was a staff upon which was loosely bound a bundle of the fiber to be spun. It was held in the left hand or was fastened in the belt. The spindle, a tapering rod smaller than the distaff, was held in the right hand. The rotation of the spindle gave the necessary twist to the thread, and around the spindle the thread was wound as it was twisted. The next development in spinning machinery was the spinning-wheel, which has continued in use in some rural parts of the world practically to the present day.

The series of inventions that overthrew hand spinning, and made this industry possible on a large scale, really began in 1738 when Lewis Paul, an English inventor, discovered a process for drawing out and attenuating threads of wool or cotton by passing the fiber through successive pairs of rollers. To-day this principle forms a fundamental feature of all spinning machinery. In 1764 James Hargreaves, an illiterate weaver and carpenter of Lancashire, England, invented the spinning-jenny, a device by which eight threads could be spun at once. With a little improvement in this invention, eighty threads were produced as easily as eight. The idea of the spinning-jenny is said to have been accidentally suggested to its inventor by watching the motions of a common spinning-wheel which one of his children had unintentionally upset.

Hargreaves is another in the long list of those who have suffered persecution because of having done something to make the world better. His fellow-spinners, filled with prejudice toward his invention because they feared it might rob them of employment, broke into his house and destroyed his machine. He then moved to Nottingham, where he erected a spinning mill. In 1770 Hargreaves took out a patent on his invention, but the patent was subsequently annulled on the ground that he had sold a few machines before patenting the invention.