would have expected to cover the cost of the engine through just a few weeks of threshing work each year. He did, however, have close business links with one of the leading steam engine manufacturers; using a steam engine on his own farm may have been an attempt to encourage other landowners to follow his example and invest in steam.
The next reference to a steam engine on a farm comes from Scotland in the following year when “a respectable farmer” in East Lothian was using a stationary engine for threshing. In this case, the farm was close to a coal mine, from which the farmer was able to collect his fuel from the pit-head at a reduced price. There are more reports of engine installations on farms in Britain during the next 40 years, but the numbers were small and the majority of farmers remained unconvinced of their usefulness. In some parts of the United States, farmers were apparently more willing to switch to steam power. A survey of agricultural steam engines in 1838 showed Pennsylvania and Louisiana leading the trend with steam power, with 274 engines already installed on Louisiana farms and estates, where they powered cane-crushing equipment for sugar production. Some of the engines were imported from Britain, but American manufacturers were expanding rapidly and would soon dominate the US domestic market.
In his book Early Stationary Steam Engines in America, Carroll W. Pursell quotes negotiations in 1812 between a Louisiana sugar estate owner and Benjamin Latrobe, one of the first of the American steam engine manufacturers. The engine was needed to power a sugar mill, and the price Latrobe quoted for an engine with a 30 cm (12 in) diameter cylinder was $2500. This figure would leave Latrobe with no profit at all, he claimed, but it would cover some of his overheads, and it might lead to further orders on which he could make a profit, which suggests that Mr. Latrobe was a persuasive salesman. Most of the steam engines installed on Louisiana farms replaced the animal power previously used for the crushers, and Pursell quotes another survey in 1840, when there were an estimated 400 steam-powered mills in the state, leaving 354 powered by animals.
From Stationary to Portable
In spite of the limited acceptance of stationary steam power on British farms and more impressive statistics from the sugar estates of Louisiana, the commercial impact of the agricultural steam engine was still minuscule even by the late 1830s. This was 40 years after John Wilkinson first showed how steam power could be used for threshing. Nevertheless, the technical breakthrough that made steam power available on many thousands of farms was on its way.
The breakthrough came when a steam engine was mounted on a chassis and four wheels so that horses could tow it from farm to farm. This was the portable engine, and it took a surprisingly long time for such a logical idea to be developed. The portable engine made a significant difference to the economics of using steam power for farm work, as it could be operated by contractors, meaning that groups of farmers in the same area could share the cost and use of an engine.
Several British companies were developing portable engines at about the same time, but credit for being the first to demonstrate the idea usually goes to J. R. & A. Ransome of Ipswich, now a subsidiary of the Textron company and known as Ransomes. It took a portable engine weighing 1.75 tonnes (1.72 tons) to the 1841 Royal Show, where it was used in a threshing demonstration and described as the “great novelty” of the show. The Ransomes portable was said to produce as much power as five horses. A special design feature was a pipe taking the waste steam into the chimney, where it mingled with the smoke from the fire to extinguish sparks that might be released to cause a fire in the heaps of threshed straw.
Most of the steam engines used on farms were portables, used mainly for stationary work, such as threshing, and were pulled from farm to farm by teams of horses. This picture clearly shows the metal seat for the driver and the wooden pole where the horses were hitched.
In the following year, Ransome followed its success with the portable by building the world’s first self-propelled agricultural steam engine, which it took to the 1842 Royal Show. The self-propelled engine, the immediate ancestor of the steam traction engine, made a slow commercial start, but the portable was an immediate success. By 1851, just 10 years after the first demonstration, the number of manufacturers of portable engines in Britain had reached at least a dozen and there were an estimated 8000 portables on UK farms.
Portable engines were also attracting interest in the United States, where the potential market for agricultural steam power was much bigger than in Britain. It is likely that some engines were built on a one-off basis before commercial production started, but the surviving records suggest that at least two manufacturers were offering portable engines for sale by 1849. Charles Hoad and Gilbert Bradford of Watertown, New York, were awarded a medal when one of their engines was shown at the 1851 New York Fair. A.L. Archambault’s “farm engine” was built in Philadelphia and was offered in three sizes with power outputs ranging up to 30 HP, according to some reports.
A Growing Manufacturing Base
More US and Canadian manufacturers flooded into the market from the 1850s onwards, building both portable and traction engines. The first J.I. Case engine was built in 1869, when the demand for steam power was beginning to expand rapidly, and Case became the United States’ largest manufacturer of portable and traction engines and also the biggest worldwide. The table on page 8 shows how Case production figures reflect trends in the market, including the rapid collapse in sales when tractor power took over. Case built its last steam engine in 1924, when the production total had reached more than 36,000 engines in 55 years.
The first Case tractor was an experimental model built in 1892. Based on the chassis and wheels of a Case traction engine, its power unit was a twin-cylinder gasoline engine. Reliability problems persuaded Case to abandon the tractor experiments and concentrate on its steam engines.
As well as increasing production, the steam engine manufacturers were also making design improvements to boost performance and efficiency, and an indication of the progress in efficiency is available in the results of trials carried out annually by the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE). The trials measured fuel efficiency or the weight of coal used per horsepower-hour of power output, which means the fuel burnt to produce one horsepower for a period of one hour. They were organized with great care in order to ensure the results were as accurate as possible and to allow results for different years to be compared. The fuel for the engines was supplied from the same coal mine each year, and an analysis of the coal was published to make the results as useful as possible.
The results for the winning portables in six years of trials between 1849 and 1855 are shown in the table below, which was originally published in The Engineer in 1856.
A Farming Solution?
By the 1850s, steam power on farms was still restricted to stationary work, including threshing and driving machines for crushing or milling grain for feeding livestock. This was the same type of work that steam engines had first handled 50 years previously. Steam was already providing power for manufacturing industries and for mining, and steam-powered railways and ships were revolutionizing transport; however, agriculture—the biggest industry of them all—still relied on horses and oxen for many important jobs, including plowing, cultivating and harvesting.
It was a challenge that attracted both engineers and farmers, who invested large amounts of time and money seeking ways to make steam power available for field work. Most of the development work was in the 1850s, and many of the experiments in the United States, Britain and France produced expensive failures. The breakthrough came when John Fowler and others in Britain developed the cable plowing system, using a steam-powered windlass to pull a plow attached to a cable back and forth across a field. Cable plowing was popular in Europe, but failed to attract interest in the United States and Canada, where soil conditions in some areas allowed steam engines to plow by direct traction with the plow hitched to the rear of a traction engine. As