Tickets available for Session 4 of The Story of Industrial Civilization

Tickets are now available for session 4 of my salon series with Interintellect, “The Story of Industrial Civilization”.

Topic: Energy

By now we’ve seen that energy is absolutely fundamental to the economy. It heats our furnaces and kilns, runs the machines in our factories and on our farms, drives transportation for passengers and cargo, and powers computing and communications infrastructure. It also provides light, heat and cooling for our homes, offices, malls, theaters, and stadiums. How did we get here, from a world with only wind, water, and animals for power, with only candles and oil lamps for lighting? In this session we’ll explore the whole story of energy, from steam, through oil and electricity, to the failed promise of nuclear power.

Sign up here.

Why did we wait so long for the threshing machine?

When ripe wheat is harvested, the edible seed is encased in an outer husk. Before the seed can be ground into flour, or boiled into porridge, or planted in the field to produce next year’s harvest, it must be removed from the husk. This process is called threshing.

As the husk is quite hard, threshing is a violent process. Traditionally, it was done with a tool called a flail, which is simply a short stick attached by a cord to a longer handle. The grain was spread out on the ground (yes, disgusting) and beaten with the stick to open the casings.

Other methods included “treading”, in which livestock trampled the grain with their hooves (yes, even more disgusting) or dragged a sledge over the grain (the Latin word for this sledge is tribulum, from which we get the world “tribulation”).

Occasionally the grain would be rubbed against a wire screen, or placed in a sack and beaten with rocks. It’s no coincidence that the word “thrashing” is similar: it is an archaic spelling of the same term.

As one of the more labor-intensive stages of wheat farming, threshing was a natural candidate to be automated by machinery. And the threshing machine was a relatively simple device: like the cotton gin, the flying shuttle, or the bicycle, it was a mechanical invention that did not depend on any scientific discoveries. Still, threshing machines were not used to any significant degree until the late 1700s in the UK and the early 1800s in the US.

Once again, the question arises: why did we wait so long?

This is a longish one with several images, so click through to read the whole thing: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-threshing-machine