The mechanical reaper
A horse-drawn machine that cuts standing grain with a reciprocating toothed blade and lays it in a swath to be gathered — doing the work of a dozen men with scythes, and breaking the harvest-labor bottleneck that had capped how much grain a single farm could grow.
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At the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, The Times dismissed McCormick's reaper as "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine." Weeks later, in a head-to-head field trial at Tiptree Heath in Essex, it out-cut the English machines, and the Exhibition's jury awarded it the Grand Council Medal and called it worth the whole cost of the fair.
它是什么
A reaper is a machine that cuts grain where a person once swung a blade. The working part is a straight knife set with triangular teeth, sliding rapidly back and forth through a comb of fixed iron fingers; stalks caught between finger and moving tooth are sheared off cleanly near the ground. A light frame carries this cutter bar out to one side, so the horse and driver walk on the cut stubble rather than trampling the standing crop. A revolving reel leans the grain back onto the blade as it is cut, and the severed stalks drop onto a platform, from which a second rider rakes them off in loose sheaves for binders following behind. The blade takes no separate power source: a large land wheel, turning as the machine rolls, drives the knife through simple gearing. The faster the horse walks, the faster it cuts.
它为何重要
Ripe grain does not wait. Once a field of wheat or oats is ready it must be cut within roughly a week to ten days, or it shatters, lodges, and spoils in the field. For all of history that window had been the hard ceiling on farming: however much a family could plow and sow in spring, it could only harvest what its own hands, plus whatever labor it could hire for the frantic weeks of harvest, could cut with sickle and scythe. A strong man with a cradle scythe cut perhaps one to three acres a day. A single reaper, with one driver and one raker, did the work of about a dozen such men. That did not merely save labor — it lifted the ceiling. A farm could now plant as much as it could plow, not merely as much as it could reap, and the vast level grainlands of the American Midwest and the Great Plains became worth breaking.
它解锁了什么
The reaper began the mechanization of the farm. Its descendants added mechanical binders that tied the sheaves, and then merged with the threshing machine to become the combine harvester, which cuts and threshes in one pass. Fewer hands were needed to feed more people, and the labor freed from the harvest fields flowed into the growing cities and factories — one of the quiet engines of the nineteenth century's urban and industrial growth. McCormick's company merged into International Harvester in 1902, for a time one of the largest manufacturers in the world.
最简可行版本
McCormick's 1831 machine: a horse walks alongside the standing grain pulling a light frame; a large ground wheel drives a straight, saw-toothed knife that vibrates side to side through fixed guard fingers, shearing the stalks; a slowly turning reel presses the grain back against the blade, and the cut stalks fall onto a platform, from which a second person rakes them off in bunches for others to bind.
此条目尚待完整撰述——制图师正在工作。它在图中的位置已经核验无误。
解锁
前沿——此后尚未绘制。
来源
- — William T. Hutchinson, *Cyrus Hall McCormick* (2 vols., 1930–1935)
- — Encyclopædia Britannica, 'Cyrus McCormick' and 'reaper'
- — Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition (London, 1851); jury awards, Class IX (Agricultural and Horticultural Machines)
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