From the archive record
The thrashing machine, or, in modern spelling, threshing machine, was a machine first invented by Scottish mechanical engineer Andrew Meikle for use in agriculture. It was invented (c.1784) for the separation of grain from stalks and husks. For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming, taking about one-quarter of agricultural labor by the 18th century.Mechanization of this process took much of the drudgery out of farm labour. Threshing is just one process in getting cereals to the grinding mill and customer. The wheat needs to be grown, cut, stooked (shocked, bundled), hauled, threshed, and then the grain hauled to an elevator and the chaff baled. For many years each of these steps was an individual process, requiring teams of w