Harvester

Harvesting machines began to spread around 1830. Cyrus Hall McCormick patented his first horse-drawn harvester in 1834, and Boyce in England, Bayley in the US, designed their own machines a few years before him.

The one shown in this picture is based on same principle as the Allen harvester, which was the first one to be popular in France: a frame supports the driver’s seat, while the saw, or sythe, is set in motion by a very simple mechanism, engaged when the horse gets the wheels going.

The caption reads in the original French: Moissoneuse.