Early combines were pulled across the American plains by twenty horses
Around 1900, farmers on the American plains and in Idaho hitched teams of twenty or more horses to giant combines. The machines took their name from combining separate jobs, reaping, threshing, winnowing and gathering, into one pass, and they became one of the most important labour-saving inventions in history.
The Scottish clergyman Patrick Bell designed a horse-pushed reaper in 1826 that cut stalks on the scissors principle still used today. In 1835 Hiram Moore in the United States patented the first true combine, able to reap, thresh and winnow grain; his full-scale machine was 5.2 metres long with a 4.57-metre cut, and by 1839 it had harvested over 20 hectares. In South Australia, John Ridley and others had built a stripper by 1843 that took only the grain heads, and Hugh Victor McKay's Sunshine Header-Harvester of 1885 became a commercial success.
Power came first from bullwheels turned by the moving team, then from steam; George Stockton Berry built a combine whose boiler burned straw. Holt Manufacturing of California produced a self-propelled harvester in 1911. In 1923 both Australia's Sunshine Auto Header and the Gleaner machine from Kansas's Baldwin brothers ran on Fordson engines. The Depression of the 1930s halted equipment purchases, and pull-type combines behind tractors only became common after World War II.
In 1937 Thomas Carroll, an Australian employed by Massey-Harris in Canada, finished developing a combine that drove itself, with a lighter version sold widely from 1940. Lyle Yost's 1947 auger made unloading grain far easier. In Europe, Claeys launched the first self-propelled combine in 1952, and Claas followed in 1953 with the Hercules, which could harvest up to 5 tonnes of wheat a day. Sperry-New Holland introduced rotary combines in 1975, stripping grain as it travels along a helical rotor.
On-board electronics arrived around the 1980s to monitor threshing efficiency and help tune ground speed. The largest class 10-plus combines of the early 2020s produce nearly 800 horsepower and carry headers up to 18 metres wide.
Source: Combine harvester
