Thursday 19 June 2014

Farming Fridays


Before tractors, farms needed some form of power to run mechanical equipment. Horsepower was the most versatile and plentiful form of power at the time. They required a little water and some hay for fuel and they’d be good to go. Generally, very simplistic and scalable, so if you needed more power you would simply get more horses.

This is a treadmill powered by a horse walking on an inclined conveyor. This unit would power something like a threshing machine which is used to separate the grain seed from the stalks. This treadmill is part of the extensive collection of antique farm equipment here at the Glengarry Pioneer Museum and was donated by Norman M. MacLeod.

A horse would be put in the middle of the treadmill and as you can see in the photograph, the wooden treads on the conveyor where the horse walks are clearly well-worn. As the horse walks, a wheel on the side would move and a system of belts and pulleys attached the treadmill to the specific machine the farmer wanted to run. There were a few different forms of treadmills, one which the horse would be walking flat, and another like our treadmill shown in the photograph where the horse would walk on in incline in order to utilize both the pulling power and the weight of the horse which would increase efficiency. Once steam engines and tractors were developed, horse treadmills were no longer used, although the importance of the quantitative unit “horsepower” came to be developed and is still used today.

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