Combine Harvester - History

History

The combine was invented in the United States by Hiram Moore in 1834, and early versions were pulled by horse or mule teams. In 1835, Moore built a full-scale version and by 1839, over 50 acres of crops were harvested. By 1860, combine harvesters with a cutting width of several metres were used on American farms. In 1882, the Australian Hugh Victor McKay had a similar idea and developed the first commercial combine harvester in 1885, the Sunshine Harvester.

Combines, some of them quite large, were drawn by mule or horse teams and used a bullwheel to provide power. Later, steam power was used, and George Stockton Berry integrated the combine with a steam engine using straw to heat the boiler.Tractor-drawn, PTO-powered combines were then used for a time. These combines used a shaker to separate the grain from the chaff and straw-walkers (grates with small teeth on an eccentric shaft) to eject the straw while retaining the grain. Tractor drawn combines evolved to have separate gas or diesel engines to power the grain separation.

In 1911, the Holt Manufacturing Company of California produced a self-propelled harvester. In Australia in 1923, the patented Sunshine Auto Header was one of the first center-feeding self-propelled harvesters. In 1923 in Kansas, the Curtis brothers and their Gleaner Manufacturing Company patented a self-propelled harvester which included several other modern improvements in grain handling. Both the Gleaner and the Sunshine used Fordson engines. In 1929 Alfredo Rotania of Argentina patented a self-propelled harvester. In 1937, the Australian-born Thomas Carroll, working for Massey-Harris in Canada, perfected a self-propelled model and in 1940 a lighter-weight model began to be marketed widely by the company. Lyle Yost invented an auger that would lift grain out of a combine in 1947, making unloading grain much easier.

In 1952 Claeys launched the first self- propelled combine harvester in Europe; in 1953, the European manufacturer CLAAS developed a self-propelled combine harvester named 'Herkules', it could harvest up to 5 tons of wheat a day. This newer kind of combine is still in use and is powered by diesel or gasoline engines. Until the self-cleaning rotary screen was invented in the mid-1960s combine engines suffered from overheating as the chaff spewed out when harvesting small grains would clog radiators, blocking the airflow needed for cooling.

A significant advance in the design of combines was the rotary design. The grain is initially stripped from the stalk by passing along a helical rotor instead of passing between rasp bars on the outside of a cylinder and a concave. Rotary combines were first introduced by Sperry-New Holland in 1975.

In about the 1980s on-board electronics were introduced to measure threshing efficiency. This new instrumentation allowed operators to get better grain yields by optimizing ground speed and other operating parameters.