Each of those tasks was done by a fully grown adult. With time those adults had kids, and then those kids did those tasks. Through the generations we replaced those kids with individual machines, and then with more time we put those machines on wheels, and eventually those wheels grew up and became full grown adults.
Everytime I see any type of industrial machine I think this is some genius shit! I'm so dumb
I learned everything I know about combine harvesters from The Wurzels
Machine go brrrr
Why wouldn't they watch the videos on a monitor, even a phone or tablet at least?
Starving people are highly motivated.
Well, the first step was making a machine that does every step of the process to make it easier. Then you combine those machines into one big machine, hence "combine".
No one starts from zero and builds a machine like this. Each of those processes was its own problem that got solved first.
They continuously improved on every single step in the process. What you see now are the descendants of many generations of harvesters.
Just wait until they learn about EUV photolithography
They are awesome, and they cost an awesome amount of money.
Farmers are always looking to make their job easier and they have a few months during the winter to build stuff.
Combines ain't that complex. But they are fussy to run. Growing up on a farm you learn to fix them at a pretty young age. I've even owned one myself, a well used Case I bought from an Uncle. I can close my eyes and "see' every stinking moving part on any of the combines we owned. And I can still remember how access the parts and fix them.
Personally, I hate balers far more.
The only downside is the required listening.
Don't worry, John Deere will find a way to fuck it up.
I’ve gone down this rabbit hole, combine harvesters might be the most advanced piece of technology ever created, they’re fucking insane. Space travel seems simpler than the engineering that goes into those mother fuckers, a computer is child play in comparison.
How? Generations of clever people ignored the naysayers who told them, "just do the work like the rest of us, you lazy bastard."
The only reason people go hungry is because of policy.
That's nothing compared to the Bagger 288
There's a theory in my family.
You have true farmers, then you have factory farms. Factory Farms are not just for animals. They exclusively produce cash crop, they exclusively optimize profit, they also do hardly any of the work themselves. They'll be in a combine, sure. But combines are quite literally automatic nowadays, so it becomes a second office where they're negotiated deals and labor and contracts and taxes.
The true farmers on the other hand? Way back when, before Monsanto and Tyson, farm communities took care of specific jobs for specific farms because one of those farmers found a really good way to do it, or is just much more efficient.
That left a little more time for each of the farmers to work on something they were skilled with, or do a hobby even.
Guess what was a popular hobby amongst farmers? Electric Scale Trains. These farmers also invented and designed and engineered a lot of these tools and equipment, because they had to repair their machines quicker than a service tech could come out.
So you get robust engineering out of a Farmer. Then the Factory Farmer comes in and says "Hey, I got a friend named John Deer who could mass produce these, and the non-presceint Farmer said cool."
BAM innovations stifled.
It works by doing all the hard work while John Deere screws you over even harder than Monsanto.
That's technology, innovate a difference
A feat of engineering, a system made efficient
There isn't a condition, complication, or a vision
Where the answer ain't to build a more sophisticated widget, idjit
David Macauley’s illustration in the book The Way Things Work is how I learned about the beauty of the combine harvester
Clearly a Promethean device
If you can reliably predict what's going to be in your field, it's only a matter of time before you work out a machine for harvesting it.
The aliens sought out new challenges after tiring of pyramids.
If you think they're complicated to have them described to you, you should try fixing one of the fuckers when it breaks down in the middle of the night.
Unreasonable people anon.
Reasonable people adapt to the world around them, use a scythe and get on with things, unreasonable people adapt the world to suit themselves. All progress is from unreasonable people.
Ps Can't remember who said it.
They're useful if I've got 20 acres and you've got 43!
Better question, why did it take us so long to come up with this.
From my perspective this "pinnacle of human ingenuity" is actually a farse, because it relies on a monoculture and is therefore unsustainable in the long term.
Don't get me wrong, the engineering is cool and I understand how important the mass production of food has been up to this point in human history, but there is another side of the story. The advent of machinery like this is part of why modern farmers use so many pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers - a monoculture depletes the soil of its nutrients and decreases natural pest control, necessitating the use of chemicals. The use of those chemicals has in turn driven huge ecosystem changes that we are only just beginning to understand the impact of (such as mass pollinator die-offs, changes to soil microbiology, pollution of fresh water sources, pollution of cropland soil, and more) as well as impacting humans in ways we don't understand since some of those chemicals make their way into our bodies.
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