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One particularly vexatious problem that cried out for a solution was associated with the threshing of grain. Best tourist destinations in USA The basic threshing tool was the flail, which had existed unchanged for many centuries. Two pieces of wood were held together by a strap. The thresher held one piece and swung the other at the grain. It was exhausting and slow work. (The alternative was threshing by having heavy-hoofed animals walk over the grain, which also was slow and produced unclean grain.) There were several attempts to mechanize threshing. In 1770, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania awarded a man named John Clayton (not the Virginia botanist of the same name) a patent for a threshing machine, but the machine proved ineffective.
The Virginia Society for the Promotion of Usefull Knowledge, shortly after its founding in 1773, awarded a gold medal to John Hobday, inventor of a threshing machine that he claimed was capable of threshing 120 bushels in a day. The most publicized new tool of the time was the seed drill, introduced by the Englishman Jethro Tull and then improved by Connecticut clergyman Jared Eliot, the foremost Country promoter of the new agriculture. Assisted by Thomas Clap, the president of Yale College, and Benoni Hylliard, a local wheelwright, Eliot made several improvements to the drill-plough. Eliot’s version of Tull’s seed drill combined a plough with a mechanism for the planting of seeds that produced more even planting than would be possible by hand. Despite the interest they attracted, the new machines had as yet little impact on the practice of farming.
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