Planting the seeds of success This week, The Green Girl returns to the Related Company series with a look at the Deere & Mansur Company, makers of early planters.
While Deere is world-famous for its first implement — the plow, it is also well-known and respected for its planter designs. Their first one came about back in 1877 when John’s brother, Charles, paired up with Alvah Mansur to form the Deere & Mansur Company. The duo began building an early corn planter that would eventually lead Deere to industry leadership in this category. Not the first but soon the best While the Deere & Mansur corn planter was not the first, it would be hard to dispute that it didn’t later become the best. The fist corn planter came from George W. Brown in the 1850s and 60s. Brown battled many competitors with patent protection on key parts of his invention. However, the unique rotary drop mechanism on the Deere & Mansur planter did not infringe on Brown’s slide-drop version. Still, there were a few tense years of legal scuttlebutt between both sides. The earliest planter designs required a first pass with a sled marker, which marked off the ground in crisscross rows. Then it was the planter’s turn. As a driver led the across the field, a second person (known as the "dropper") sat on the front of the seeder and jerked a lever to drop the seed at each crisscross mark.
Soon, a new collateral device called the "check-rower" was attached to the planter. This involved anchoring a wire or rope at the far end of the field. As the planter moved forward, it passed evenly spaced knots on the line, which then triggered the rotary drop to place a seed. This system created a square, check-rowed pattern that allowed convenient cross-cultivation. Best of all, this system eliminated the dropper boy. And when the check-rower was built right into the planter itself, it automatically took up the reel, which finally made planting a one-person job. Still, if the check-rower used rope, more problems developed. C.W. Mansur, Alvah’s nephew, recalls, "When the rope was left out overnight and it became damp, there was great shrinkage, so when you started in the morning to plant it was too short and when you finished at night you had rope to spare, consequently, out of check. To overcome this difficulty, manufacturers used a tarred rope and when this was left out overnight, while it no longer would shrink or expand, it was food for field mice with the result that you frequently had a large number of sections in the morning." (Quote from John Deere’s Company, page 216). The aim for accuracy Once the switch was made to wire in the check-rower, the next problem was inaccurate seed spacing.
Most planters used a plate that had a hole large enough to hold several seeds for hill-dropping, where multiple seeds were placed in a hill. Yet the number of seeds varied, altering yields accordingly. So Deere & Mansur developed a new concept, an accumulative single-kernel drill planter, which was supposedly 65 to 85 percent more accurate than previous models. In 1914, they introduced the "edge-drop" design — a major innovation in accuracy. The No. 999 Edge-Drop Planter would soon become the world standard. In fact, the No. 999 would remain in Deere’s product line until 1956! Not only was it the most accurate, but it was also considered the most reliable as it used 50 percent fewer moving parts than competitive models. Planters would continue to be an integral part of Deere’s product line. The next major industry innovation credited to Deere is the introduction of the MaxEmergeÆ planter in 1974.
The revolutionary row-unit design dominated until 1985 when Deere introduced the MaxEmerge 2 version with its famed VacuMeter™ system. That, too, continued to set the standard until the MaxEmerge Plus design came out in 1996. Today, this third-generation row-unit carries on the tradition and leadership that began with the first corn planter built by the Deere & Mansur Company. In fact, the planter factory of today is on the same site as the first facility and just a few hundred yards from the original plow factory. Next week, The Green Girl continues the Related Companies series with a review of another planting-related story. Read about the Van Brunt Manufacturing Company of Horicon, Wisconsin, who gave Deere its first grain drill! Ý
|
||||||||||||||||
The hand itself is estimated in value from $500-750 and the dealer
display sold earlier this week on Ebay for almost $900. It’s the only known surviving
display and the instructions are intact! Hand © 1999 Nick Cedar/Display ©
2000 Ebay Auction 
