It was with such crude and imperfect inventions that the farmers faced the grain and grass fields of the nineteenth century. The Seven Wonders of the ancient world have often been compared with the wonders of invention of this present day. Senator Platt in an address at the Patent Centennial Celebration in Washington, in 1891, made such a contrast: “The old wonders of the world were the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Phidian statue of Jupiter, the Mausoleum, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria. Two were tombs of kings, one was the playground of a petted queen, one was the habitat of the world’s darkest superstition, one the shrine of a heathen god, another was a crude attempt to produce a work of art solely to excite wonder, and one only, the lighthouse at Alexandria, was of the slightest benefit to mankind. They were created mainly by tyrants; most of them by the unrequited toil of degraded and enslaved labourers. In them was neither improvement nor advancement for the people.” With some excess of patriotic pride, he contrasts these with what he calls “the seven wonders of American invention.” They were the cotton-gin; the adaptation of steam to methods of transportation; the application of electricity to business pursuits; the harvester; the modern printing-press; the ocean cable; and the sewing machine. “How wonderful,” he adds, “in conception, in construction, in purpose, these great inventions are; how they dwarf the Pyramids and all the wonders of antiquity; what a train of blessings each brought with its entrance into social life; how wide, direct and far-reaching their benefits. Each was the herald of a social revolution; each was a human benefactor; each was a new Goddess of Liberty; each was a great Emancipator of man from the bondage of labour; each was a new teacher come upon earth; each was a moral force.” Of these seven wonders, the harvester and the cotton-gin will only be described in this chapter. “Harvester” has sometimes been used as a broad term to cover both mowers and reapers. In a recent and more restricted sense, it is applied to a machine that cuts grain, separates it into gavels, and binds it. The difficulty that confronted the invention of mowers was the construction, location and operation of the cutting part. To convert the scythe or the sickle, or some other sharp blade into a fast reciprocating cutter, to hang such cutter low so that it would cut near the ground, to protect it from contact with stones by a proper guard, to actuate it by the wheels of the vehicle, to hinge the cutter-bar to the frame so that its outer end might be raised, and to arrange a seat on the machine so that the driver could control the operating parts by means of a lever, or handles, were the main problems to be solved. In 1799, Boyce, of England, had a vertical shaft with six rotating scythes beneath the frame of the implement. This died with the century.