1901 A.B. Farquhar Company Threshing Steam Engine

1901 A.B. Farquhar Company Threshing Steam Engine. . , Arthur Briggs Farquhar, American Industrialist , Arthur Briggs Farquhar was born on September 28, 1838, in Montgomery County, Maryland. Arthur, known as A.B., was an ambitious young man who apired to a career in business. He had an early interest in things and wanted to go into manufacturing., In 1856, Farquhar began his career in York, Pennsylvania, as a machinist's apprentice at the W.W. Dingee Co., working with hand-drill presses, forgest and planers. After completing the apprenticeship in 1858, he became a partner and traveled through the South, selling the company's farm machines and implements. The Dingee facotry burned down in 1861. Farquhar assumed the company's liabilities and assets and renamed the firm Pennsylvania Agricultural Works. In 1876, the factory again burned but was rebuilt and expanded. The 500,000-square-foot facility was renamed the A.B. Farquhar Company., The A.B. Farquhar Company was known worldwide for its agricultural machinery, such as cotton, corn, and grain planters, threshing machines, balers, and steam traction engines. The steam engines were used as portable power plants to run threshers, grind feed, operate mills, drill wells, and cut lumber, among other things., In 1911, Farquhar turned the company over to his son Francis. In 1952, the A.B. Farquhar Company was sold to Oliver Farm Equipment, which in 1960 was acquired by White Motor Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio. A.B. Farquhar died on March 5, 1925, leaving a legacy as a highly principled businessman and one of the nation's most successful industrialists., How does a steam engine work? , A simple steam engine includes a firebox, boiler, cylinder with a poison, pusher, and flywheel. Some steam engines are more complex and consist of many more parts. To create steam, water in a boiler is heated by burning coal or wood. The steam has a much larger volume than liquid water. This creates pressure that causes the steam to move through a pipe into a cylinder where it pushes a piston back and forth. The force of the piston moving back and forth drives a flywheel, which transmits energy. This energy is then used to power machinery., The steam engine was one of the most important inventions of the Industrial Revolution,t paving the way for mechanization in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation., The Threshing Steam Engine, Mechanizing American Agriculture , The 1901 threshing steam engine displayed here was a collaborative effort of the A.B. Farquhar Company and the Ajax Company. The engine was built by Ajax with other components provided by Farquhar. The steam engine was used on a farm in Berryville, Virginia. Threshing is the process of removing seeds from the stalks and husks of grain. For example, when wheat is harvested, the seeds are encased in an outer husk. The seeds must be removed from the husks before they can be ground into flour or planted to produce the next year's crop., Before threshing machines were invented, threshing was often done by hand with a flail. A flail is a short stick attached by a cord to a longer handle. The grain would be spread out on the ground and beaten with the flail to open the casings and make the seeds fall out. This was a very labor-intensive process. Another method was treading, in which livestock trampled the grain with their hooves or dragged a sledge over the grain., The threshing machine removed the grain from the husk, cleaned the grain, and then gathered it. The first threshing machiens were horse-powered, but by the 1860s, farmers were using steam traction engines like the one displayed here. Threshing machines and steam engines were very large and too expensive for individual small farmers to own. Often both the steam engine and the thresher were owned by a contractor who provided service to the farms in the region. The steam engines were pulled from farm to farm by teams of horses, mules, or oxen. However, by the mid-1870s, self-propelled steam engines were being manufactured. By about 1930, the era of the thresher was ending in favor yet another innovation, the combine harvester that could both harvest and thresh in a single operation.