Obed Hussey

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Obed Hussey

Obed Hussey (born October 7, 1792 in Hallowell , Maine , USA ; † August 4, 1860 near Boston ) was an American inventor of a grain mower, which was first used in 1833 and then widespread in Illinois , Maryland , New York and Pennsylvania found that made harvesting easier and increased productivity in agriculture. He was the first inventor to patent a mower in 1834.

Live and act

Hussey grew up as the son of Quakers Samuel and Charlotte Hussey in Exeter in Maine and in Nantucket Island in Massachusetts on the east coast of the USA. As a young man he probably worked as a seaman on a whaling ship and lost an eye there. When he was 30 years old, he moved to Cincinnati , Ohio , in 1822 , where he began experimenting with grain husking, grinding, and sugar cane press machines. From 1830 he worked in Baltimore on a farm owned by Richard B. Chenaworth on a cereal mower. He returned to Cincinnati as early as 1832, where he constructed a working mower that ran on two wheels and was pulled by a horse. In July 1833 he used this successfully for the first time at the Carthage agricultural cooperative near Hamilton in Ohio. He patented it in 1834, after which it was widely used in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland by 1838. In 1838 Hussey opened a large production factory in Baltimore, where he lived. In the 1840s, his closest associate, Thomas Judge Lovegrove, became a business partner and the company was renamed Hussey & Lovegrove. From 1842, his brother Thomas R. Hussey also produced and sold the mowers in Auburn , New York . In 1848 the American patent office decided not to renew the patent on the mower. By 1850 there were around 30 suppliers on the American market.

Its main competitor was Cyrus McCormick of Rockbridge County , Virginia , who had demonstrated his first mower as early as 1831, but wasn't able to patent it until 1834, about six months after Hussey. The two tried by means of patent rights and exhibition successes in the USA and England on the market and with farmers. Both machines were presented in the Crystal Palace during the 1851 World's Fair in London . Outside town on Tiptree Heath there was a summer grain cutting competition, which McCormick's Virginia Reaper won.

Although Hussey initially sold more machines, McCormick thought more strategically, was more enterprising, took over ideas from other inventors by buying patents, moved to more central Chicago and was able to win the west of the country for himself. So he prevailed against the simpler and more straightforward Hussey, which had to go bankrupt in 1858. McCormick bought the patent for a mower with automatic rake from Hussey in the same year .

Hussey died in 1860 on a trip with his wife and two daughters from Boston to Portland , Maine, when he tried to get on a moving railroad car and was run over by him. He had been developing a new, steam-powered plow since 1855. He was buried in Baltimore.

literature

  • Frances and Joseph Gies: The Ingenious Yankees. The men, ideas, and machines that transformed a nation, 1776-1886 , Crowell, New York 1976, pp. 187-201: Obed Hussey and Cyrus McCormick: Mechanization of Agriculture .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vishal Mangalwadi: The Book of the Middle. Fontis, Basel 2014, page 438
  2. ↑ Frances and Joseph Gies: The Ingenious Yankees. The men, ideas, and machines that transformed a nation, 1776-1886 , Crowell, New York 1976, pp. 187-201: Obed Hussey and Cyrus McCormick: Mechanization of Agriculture
  3. ↑ http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Obed_Hussey
  4. ↑ http://www.madehow.com/inventorbios/91/Obed-Hussey.html
  5. ↑ https://www. britica.com/biography/Obed-Hussey
  6. ↑ Bob Rode & Lee Hite: Timeline of the Life of Obed Hussey (German: Zeittafel des Lebens von Obed Hussey )
personal data
SURNAME Hussey, Obed
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American inventor grain mower
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1792
PLACE OF BIRTH Hallowell , Maine
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1860
Place of death Boston