The smooth surface of steel seemed like a logical alternative to coarser iron. John Deere (1804-1886) established a process for perfecting the plow, which led to the creation of a company that has invented or mass-produced not only plows but also cultivators, combines and tractors. It tended to clump up on the blade of a plow, requiring a farmer to stop every few minutes to clear it. The soil was stickier than the sandier soils back east. The plants of the native prairie had a tangle of tough roots that standard plows of the day had difficulty cutting through. One of the major obstacles was the soil itself. If that soil could be cultivated, fortunes could be made. Farmland with rich, black soil stretched out like an ocean of grass. In the 1830's, young America was moving west and settling the prairie. John Deere's early steel plows represent a key moment in time where Stone age technology was upgraded into something of which Henry Ford certainly would have been proud. Steel, engines and mass production resulted in farming equipment that rapidly bent most of the planet's land to the will of human beings. Transformation of land was incremental until the industrial revolution. The earliest plows drawn by livestock first appear in the archaeological record about 8,000 years ago.
He forged the blade into a plow and the plow forged a farming revolution.Īs the Anthropocene epoch arose, the reshaping of the Earth's surface has largely taken place, one furrow at a time, behind plows. Martin Van Buren was president, a financial crisis was in the news and America's most popular song was, ironically, “ Woodman, Spare That Tree.” Steel was a scarce commodity in those days and the old blade caught the eye of a young visiting blacksmith named John Deere, who took it home.
The mill was probably filled with the nutty scent of freshly cut white oak and one imagines that the discarded blade was covered in a layer of fine, pale sawdust. In 1837 in an Illinois sawmill, a long, steel saw blade broke.
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