Many of the folks reading this have seen a big steam traction engine, belching black smoke as it pulled six or eight or more plow bottoms behind it, often with several people riding the plow’s footboards to work the depth and lifting levers. These large rigs were used in the vast fields of the northwestern U.S. and Canada where they had lots of room to maneuver. The heyday of steam plowing in this country was from about 1870 to probably 1920, when gas- and kerosene-burning tractors came into widespread use.
In the smaller fields of Great Britain and northern Europe, farmers were just as keen to use steam power as their North American counterparts, and attempts at steam cultivation began much earlier than here. In about 1840, experiments with direct traction steam plows and cultivators were made by wealthy English and Scottish landowners, but the engines and drive systems proved unsatisfactory. In addition, the heavy engines swiftly became mired in the low-lying, boggy land common in Great Britain.
Paving the way for steam plowing
One of the first of such plowing engines was built by John Heathcoat and Josiah Parkes in the early 1830s. This was the first plowing engine that actually worked, and probably the first crawler as well. Two continuous tracks of heavy canvas with wooden lags went around wheels 8 feet in diameter. On a low platform between the wheels were the steam boiler and engine, as well as two winding drums at right angles to the tracks. Steel cables weren’t yet available, so each drum was wrapped by a long, flexible hauling band made of iron strips fastened together.
The engine ran on a raised, rolled roadway constructed through the middle of a field. A haulage band was run to each side from a winding drum across the field, around a pulley on a movable anchor cart and back to the other winding drum. A single-bottom walking plow worked on each side. When one plow was going out, the other was coming back to the engine. At the end of each round, the two anchor carts and the engine were moved ahead. The contraption was not very successful and was abandoned after Heathcoat had sunk ÂŁ12,000 (about $60,000, $1.5 million today) in the thing. However it had served an important purpose: Subsequent inventors now knew that steam could be harnessed to pull a plow.
Mastering the roundabout
Various experiments continued. In about 1850, a double windlass was developed. That innovation permitted adoption of the “roundabout” system of cultivation. A hemp or wire rope was strung around the outside edge of the field to be worked. Movable pulley anchors were placed at the corners and guides called “rope porters” were placed between to keep the ropes from dragging on the ground. A portable steam engine belted to the double windlass was sited at the field’s edge and each end of the rope was attached to one of the two windlasses. A plow or cultivator was hooked to the rope at a field corner opposite the engine and was pulled back and forth across the field by reversing the winding drums on the windlass. Laborers were stationed around the field to move anchors and guides as necessary; the engine and windlass never moved. Implements used with the roundabout system were usually fairly light and guided by a man walking behind. They had to be manhandled at each end of the field to position them for the return trip.
The roundabout system worked pretty well, although it took a lot of time to set up and a lot of manpower to move the rope pulleys and porters. If the plow hit an obstruction, the ropes sometimes broke (and I’m sure the corner rope pulleys were jerked out of position when that happened). The system required a lot of rope or cable; one farmer reported using 2,000 yards of cable to cultivate a 50-acre field.
There were also proponents of direct haulage of plows and many attempts were made along those lines. The weight of the engines and the difficulty of maintaining traction on soft ground, as well as unsatisfactory drive trains, were big drawbacks. Direct haulage never seems to have caught on in Great Britain as it did in the Western Hemisphere.
Evolution of the mole
Born in 1826, John Fowler had seen the widespread starvation that resulted from the Irish potato famine. He determined to do something to help the cultivation of Ireland’s wet, boggy land. To drain wet fields, farmers had long used mole plows (a bullet-shaped share or plug at the lower end of a thin vertical blade). When pulled through a wet field, the mole plow’s thin vertical coulter blade made a slit in the soil, while the bullet-shaped plug made a tunnel-like hole in the ground. Water ran into the slit and through the hole to the edge of the field. Moles made in this way weren’t very long-lasting and soon collapsed or filled with silt.
Fowler came up with the idea of hooking a long rope strung with a series of round baked clay tiles behind the mole plug, forming a pipe drain that was much more durable than a regular mole drain. His first effort, demonstrated in 1850, was pulled across the field by long ropes on capstans powered by horse- or man-power. Pulling the mole plow and the tile through the ground required a lot of power, so Fowler began to experiment with steam engines.
From these early experiments, Fowler became involved in steam cultivation, and the art of cable plowing and cultivation developed from there. At the suggestion of Essex farmer David Greig, Fowler developed a balance plow with two opposing sets of four bottoms on either side of a central wheeled axle. The plow could be tipped on its axle and pulled in either direction while throwing all the furrows one way, eliminating the hassle of having to turn a heavy plow at the furrow ends.
In the spring of 1856, Fowler demonstrated his roundabout cable system on heavy ground, using a Ransomes & Sims 6 hp portable engine and his own double-drum windlass wound with an iron wire rope. Anchors were dug in at the field corners and the rig worked like a charm, turning one acre per hour. The biggest drawback was the large amount of labor needed to dig new holes for the anchors as the furrows advanced across the field. Soon a 4-wheel, weighted anchor cart was developed. It required little digging and could be easily moved with horses.
More next time. FC
Author’s note: Many thanks and a big tip of the Rusty Iron cap to Peter J. Longfoot of Ashton, Petersborough, England. Peter is the editor of Steam Plough Times, the quarterly journal of the Steam Plough Club, as well as an acknowledged expert on crawler tractors. He is the author of Caterpillar Tractors Little 10 to Big 10 and writes a monthly column on crawler tractors in the magazine Vintage Tractor & Countryside Heritage. Peter provided most of the photographs and captions used in this column, and straightened me out on a couple of misconceptions.
Sam Moore grew up on a farm in western Pennsylvania. He now lives in Salem, Ohio, and collects antique tractors, implements and related items. Contact Sam by email at letstalkrustyiron@att.net.
Read the second part of this article in the June 2012 issue of Farm Collector.