1873 | Agriculture
Agriculture
Dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) prepared by German chemistry student Othmar Zeidler at Strasbourg will find initial use as a mothproofing agent for clothes. Zeidler has reacted chloral hydrate (the "Mickey Finn" knockout drops of the underworld) and chlorobenzene in the presence of sulfuric acid. He will describe DDT next year in the Proceedings of the German Chemical Society (Berichte der Chemischen Gesellschaft), but has no idea of the significance of his discovery (see 1939).
Four Aberdeen-Angus bulls from Scotland arrive at Victoria, Kansas, May 17, the first of the breed to reach the United States. Foreign investment capital is pouring into the U.S. cattle ranching industry; retired London silk merchant George Grant, now 51, came to America 2 years ago (see retail, trade, 1861), traveled from New England to California and back, became enamored of the virgin prairies, and convinced the Kansas Pacific Railroad to sell him 2,500 acres of its right-of-way. By last year he had acquired 69,000 acres at about 88ยข per acre, the bulls left Glasgow on the steamship Alabama April 1, the ship steamed up the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis, and the bulls have come to Victoria by rail; Grant will bring over some Angus heifers in 1876, others will follow his lead, and the breed will soon be competing with shorthorns and Herefords (see 1881).
Barbed wire exhibited at the De Kalb, Illinois, county fair by Henry Rose draws scrutiny from local farmer Joseph F. (Farwell) Glidden, 60, and his friend Jacob Haish, who independently develop machines for producing coil barbed wire by the mile and obtain patents for two separate styles of the "devil's rope" that is destined to end the open range in the West; 80.5 million pounds of barbed wire will be manufactured in the next 74 years as the steel wire becomes important not only to farmers and ranchers but also to military operations (see 1867; Gates, 1875).
Philadelphia-born Minnesota politician Ignatius (Loyola) Donnelly, 41, complains that it costs as much to ship wheat from Minneapolis to Milwaukee as to ship the same wheat from Milwaukee to Liverpool. U.S. railroads are making deals `with elevator companies, commission agents, and others to control both shipping and marketing rates and forcing farmers to sell to the nearest elevator company, agent, or railroad at rates favorable to the buyer. Grain is often downgraded as No. 2 because it is said to be wet, frozen, or weedy, and is then sold as No. 1 grade to millers, say the farmers. A farmers' convention at Springfield, Illinois, attacks monopolies, calling them "detrimental to the public prosperity, corrupt in their management, and dangerous to republican institutions."
The Northwest Farmers' Convention at Chicago urges federal regulation of transportation rates, government-built and government-owned railroads, an end to corporation subsidies and of tariff protection for industry, a revision of the credit system, and the encouragement of decentralized manufacturing, demands that bankers, industrialists, and railroad operators call "un-American."
The National Grange reaches its membership peak of 750,000, but Rep. Ignatius Donnelly compares a nonpolitical farmers' organization to a gun that won't shoot (see 1868; 1876).
Good quality Werner harvesters made by a Grange factory in Iowa sell for half the price of a McCormick harvester. When 22 plow manufacturers agree not to sell plows to Granges except at retail prices, some Granges set up factories to make their own machines and break the "machinery rings" (see 1872; 1875).
Deering harvesters are introduced by entrepreneur William Deering, now 47, who has left the New York textile firm Deering Milliken and established a company at Piano, Illinois (see International Harvester, 1902).
W. W. Cargill and his brother Sam take advantage of the economic recession to buy out bankrupt grain-elevator operators at distress prices (see 1865). They have been acquiring or building elevators along the route of the Southern Minnesota Railroad across southern Wisconsin and Minnesota with funds advanced by Milwaukee banks (see 1909).
Britain receives her first wheat from India via the Suez Canal that opened in 1869. Russia has been the nation's chief source of supply, but British entrepreneurs have grown impatient at having to rely on the Russians and have worked to obtain a secure source of cheap wheat under British control, pushing canals and railroads into the Indus and Ganges river valleys.
Louisiana's sugar crop falls to less than one-third its 1853 level as a result of the Civil War and emancipation. Sugar production has shifted to Cuba, where U.S., British, and French capital have developed plantations that by 1900 will be exporting 10 times more sugar than Jamaica exported at the start of this century with only three times as much labor and five times as much investment in machinery as in land.
Rice planting increases in Louisiana as the industry shifts from South Carolina, whose fields before the Civil War grew 60 percent of the nation's crop. With slave labor no longer available, and South Carolina's swamp land unable to support the weight of heavy equipment, cheap land in Louisiana has attracted German wheat farmers from the Midwest, who adapt their wheat-growing expertise to rice cultivation, which requires less labor than sugar. In years to come Louisiana, Arkansas, California, Mississippi, Texas, and Missouri will produce virtually all of the rice grown in the United States (see Wright, 1890).
The Pekin duck introduced to Long Island March 14 by Stonington, Connecticut, sea captain James E. Palmer begins an industry. The white birds obtained from the imperial aviaries at Beijing (Peking) are a variety of mallard.