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Changes in Early Farming Inventions

  • Cotton Gin

    Cotton Gin
    Sometime during 1793, Eli Whitney built a machine that allowed 1,000 pounds of cotton to be cleaned in the time it took one person to clean 5 pounds by hand. Because of this, the price of cotton went down and the use of slave labor in growing cotton went up.
  • Thresher

    Thresher
    During 1830, two men from the United States was credited with inventing the first American thresher, having a horse to pull it, and adding a fanning mill to separate and clean the grain.(Before this, in 1786, a type of threshing machine with a toothed cylinder and concaves was invented in Scotland.)
  • McCormick Reaper

    McCormick Reaper
    Beginning sometime in the 1830s, Cyrus McCormick invented a grain harvesting machine called the reaper. It still required the sheaves to be bound by hand, but was a quicker way of gathering grain. Later, many more advances would happen with the reaper.
  • Harvester-Thresher

    Harvester-Thresher
    The first successful harvester-thresher was built by Hiram Moore and then patented in June of 1836. He put a steam engine on a combine to drive the machine, which lowered the number of horses needed to pull it.
  • Portable Steam Engine

    Portable Steam Engine
    Portable steam engines first came out sometime in 1849. Before this, stationary steam engines were used to run cotton gins and mills. With the use of horses, steam engines could be hauled around to different places. Several years later, self-propelled engines were developed.
  • Basic Gasoline Tractor

    Basic Gasoline Tractor
    During the year of 1892, in Charles City, Iowa, the first type of successful tractor was built by Charles Hart and Charles Parr. It was to help in replacing the steam tractors. In the beginning, these tractors were not reliable, but later ones were and eventually became very popular
  • International Harvester Auto Truck

    International Harvester Auto Truck
    It is hard to know for sure when the first type of truck came about, but International Harvester introduced an "auto wagon" sometime in 1907. People had carried things around by hand, in wagons, in carts, by horse, and many other things. This was the first attempt at something more to help people move things from one place to another.