J. I. Case And His Thresher Warranty

engine and thresher to harvest the grain. The traction engine with
its gigantic flywheel was working well, but the separator would not
clean the grain and was consuming far too much power.

The farmer complained to the local Case dealer who came out and
tinkered with this and adjusted that trying to make the separator
perform right. Still it failed to perform satisfactorily.
Exasperated, the dealer wired the Case Company about the poor
performance. The company sent out their chief troubleshooter
certain that he could make the thresher do the job right. After a
period of tinkering, adjusting, and swearing, he, too, was unable
to fix the thresher. In desperation, he wired headquarters to
refund the farmer’s money or replace the thresher.

The telegraphed reply was indeed astounding. J. I. Case,
himself, wired: ‘Am taking next train. Meet me at
Faribault.’ The old man himself was coming!

Jerome Increase Case was sixty-five years old. His beard was
white from ear to ear. From beneath brows black as coal, peered
steel-blue eyes. His erect frame was encased in a frock coat. He
commonly wore a square-cut derby hat, but on this occasion it
pleased him to sport a white tile called the Blaine hat. This was
Jerome Increase Case, the founder and head of the J. I. Case
Threshing Machine Company. The Threshing Machine King was on his
way to Minnesota to help a single Rice county farmer. J. I. had
NEVER had a piece of Case machinery that he could not fix.

Word got around in Rice County that old J. I. Case in the flesh
was coming to tinker with his thresher. When he arrived at the
farm, a crowd of farmers had gathered to see him make the thresher
clean that grain.

J. I. lost no time. He removed his frock coat and hat and fell
to work. An hour or so later, Case straightened up and gave orders
to start the thresher, and he, himself, fed grain into it for a few
a minutes. Then he had it stopped. Case worked on it and tried it
out repeatedly, all to no avail. It began to get dark. The thing
that had stumped his experts had now stumped him.

He turned to the farmer. ‘Have you a sizeable can of
kerosene handy?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ the farmer replied.
And away he went to fetch it while Case eyed the thresher with
coldly venomous regard.

Once the kerosene was brought, J. I. Case doused the thresher
from one end to the other. He struck a match and set her off. The
falling night was lighted by the flames of that brand-new Case
thresher being burned to the ground! In the light of the flames, a
defeated and chagrinned Mr. Case put on his frock coat and his
Blaine hat, bowed to all present, and took off for Racine.

Case was sadly disappointed and angered that a defective machine
had been allowed to leave his factory. What seemed to have been a
tragic affair, however, turned out not so badly after all. True to
the Case Company guarantee, the farmer got a new threshing machine
within twenty-four hours. Also, the effect of the dramatic
destruction of the imperfect thresher was indeed memorable, for
that act might have been the greatest advertisement of a thresher
warranty that J. I. Case ever wrote.