Fred Dibnah's Age Of Steam by Dibnah Fred

Author:Dibnah, Fred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Ransome and May traction engine, 1849.

Back in England John Fowler, in Leeds, had grand ideas about ploughing by steam. He was one of the first to see the potential of developing a small, portable steam engine for use in agriculture and he manufactured some of the first steam-powered ploughs and threshing machines. During a period of more than thirty years he made the construction and use of traction engines his special study, and carried out the most extensive and exhaustive experiments regardless of the expense.

Fowler was born in Wiltshire in 1826, the third son of a wealthy Quaker merchant, and he might well have lived longer and more comfortably had he followed the business of a corn merchant, as his father had wished. But he gained valuable experience in farming methods, which was to be particularly useful later when he went on to become a pioneer of mechanized agriculture. It was after seeing the famine in Ireland following two years of failed potato crops that he gave up his job, determined to mechanize land drainage by the use of steam. The result was his mole drainage plough, shown in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and built for him by Ransome’s. This ‘mole drainer’ was a great, shell-shaped piece of iron with a knife on it. They stuck it down into the ground and dragged it by brute force through the clay. It cut a slot in the clay and left a round hole down below, which created drains under heavily clayed land. In 1858, Fowler was awarded the £500 prize offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England for his balance plough. He was said to have spent ten times the amount of the award on his experiment to produce it. His first successful ploughing engine was built for him by the firm of Clayton and Shuttleworth at their works in Lincoln. Sets of ploughing tackle were built for him by several contractors until he set up on his own in the 1860s in Leeds.

Fowler was highly successful in introducing pairs of traction engines standing one on each side of a field. The earliest ploughing engines were weird things – basically a portable engine with a great winding drum under the boiler. They were driven by gearing from the crankshaft and an endless wire rope going all the way round a field supported by anchors, which had big bobbins for the rope to pass round. Each one was equipped below the belly of the machine with a huge revolving drum, which could take up to 800 yards (732 m) of metal rope. Each engine pulled in turn to draw a simple plough across the field. At the end of each line the plough was lifted out of the soil and a second one put in before that was dragged back across the field in the opposite direction. It must’ve taken a long time to set one of these things up and it needed a lot of men. The

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