Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Louise Pattison and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 2 JOHN DEERE'S STEEL PLOW _Edward C. Kendall_ DEERE AND ANDRUS 17 THE FIRST PLOW 19 STEEL OR IRON 21 WHY A STEEL PLOW 23 RECONSTRUCTIONS 24 IN SUMMARY-- 25 _By Edward C. Kendall_ JOHN DEERE'S STEEL PLOW _John Deere in 1837 invented a plow that could be used successfully in the sticky, root-filled soil of the prairie. It was called a steel plow. Actually, it appears that only the cutting edge, the share, on the first Deere plows was steel. The moldboard was smoothly ground wrought iron._ _Deere's invention succeeded because, as the durable steel share of the plow cut through the heavy earth, the sticky soil could find no place to cling on its polished surfaces._ Americans moving westward in the beginning of the 19th century soon encountered the prairie lands of what we now call the Middle West. The dark fertile soils promised great rewards to the farmers settling in these regions, but also posed certain problems. First was the breaking of the tough prairie sod. The naturalist John Muir describes the conditions facing prairie farmers when he was a boy in the early 1850's as he tells of the use of the big prairie-breaking plows in the following words:[1] They were used only for the first ploughing, in breaking up the wild sod woven into a tough mass, chiefly by the cord-like roots of perennial grasses, reinforced by the tap roots of oak and hickory bushes, called "grubs," some of which were more than a century old and four or five inches in diameter.... If in good trim, the plough cut through and turned over these grubs as if the century-old wood were soft like the flesh of carrots and turnips; but if not in good trim the grubs promptly tossed the plough out of the ground.