{"id":398,"date":"2013-04-07T11:24:25","date_gmt":"2013-04-07T16:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/?p=398"},"modified":"2014-03-11T15:45:47","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T20:45:47","slug":"horsepower-1884","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/horsepower-1884.html","title":{"rendered":"Horsepower, 1884"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

As I was doing my usual reading of old newspapers I ran across this advertisement. Ads for agricultural implements aren’t unusual, but this one in a May 1884 issue of the Bismarck Tribune<\/em> caught my eye because of the odd device at the top. Mounted to a wagon are a large array of gears and pulleys, with no immediate explanation of what it does. It doesn’t have the parts to be a harvester, or a binder, or a thresher, and way too many gears to be a plow or a rake. What could this mysterious machine have done for a Dakota Territory farmer of the 1880s?<\/p>\n

The main clue is the big wheel in the middle. Spaced evenly around its bullwheel are 10 square loops, alternating a large one and a small one. I’ve seen these before, on a horse-powered hay-baler<\/a>. You run long bars through the rings that attach to the horse’s harness, so as the horse walks around the machine, the wheel turns and mechanical energy is generated.<\/p>\n

The machine in the advertisement is, literally, a five horsepower engine. It gets difficult to search for similar machines, because “horse-power” pulls up pictures of late-model Fords and Toro lawnmowers.\u00a0This excellent document<\/a> has eye-witness description of one of these at work, along with some good pictures and description of what it does. The underside of the machine shows a combination pulley and drive-shaft, which is the output of the power. Another name for these is a horsepower ‘sweep’<\/a>, due to the carousel-like sweeping motion the horses make as they produce their power.<\/p>\n

At the time, a five-horsepower steam traction engine<\/a> was an unhappy combination of expensive, difficult to use, and dangerous when things go wrong. The ongoing industrial revolution was producing innumerable labor-saving devices for the farmer, and this was the way to get the power without replacing your horses or investing in a big expensive machine that’d probably kill you, or at least take a bunch of your fingers. Not that the open gearing of the horse-power above was all that much more safe, but it’s easier to stop well-trained horses than to disengage a steam engine. Technology moves quickly, though: the size and reliability of steam and gasoline engines caught up with and exceeded horse-power sweeps by the beginning of the 20th century, so the window for these links between the unmechanized history of farming and today’s technological marvels of machinery wasn’t very long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I was doing my usual reading of old newspapers I ran across this advertisement. Ads for agricultural implements aren’t unusual, but this one in a May 1884 issue of the Bismarck Tribune caught my eye because of the odd device at the top. Mounted to a wagon are a large array of gears and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[266,585,53,584],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1444,"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/1444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.infomercantile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}