VOL. 1  NO. 1

THE IOWA FARMSTEAD

1920

Prof. E.W. Hamilton

   Manufacturers have long utilized cheaper power to the exclusion of human power.  The farmer also has made a beginning.  Though he is no longer the man with the hoe, he has only as yet toyed with “power farming” and he is yet his won “chore boy.”  The gasoline engine, now rivaling old “Dobbin” in dependability, bids fair to life much of the weary drudgery still clinging to farm life.
     The one-horse engine, costing one-third as much as his hairy brother and asking no maintenance rations when idle, is strictly the farmer’s “right hand man.”  It will pump the water for the stock for two cents an hour for fuel; it will turn the grindstone, the fanning mill, the washing-machine, the bone cutter, and the family grist mill more steadily than the farmer’s son.  It will relieve him and the farmer’s wife from these irksome tasks or perhaps it may obviate the necessity of stopping the hired man and the team.  For one cent per hour it will turn the cream separator and thus relieve the housewife of that unpleasant task in the hot summer evenings. None but the uninitiated can appreciate the value of being spared the “sweat out” just before trying to seek rest on a sultry summer night.
     Indeed if the farmer is so fixed and the cows do not object, this same engine, by the aid of a milking machine, will do the milking for him. 
 The churning too, is on its list of accomplishments and while the engine is doing the work the housewife reads the morning paper. This little dynamo places a new range of possibilities in the hands of the country housewife.  With it the

electric sad iron is easily practicable.  The sewing machine may be motor driven; and were it not for the personal factor, the rattle might be shaken and the cradle rocked by the same power.
    Certainly the gas engine is capable of serving the farmer in many ways and more cheaply than any other prime motor.  It will aid the farmer as a source of power to the end that he may better direct other power than that of his own sinews in the accomplishment of his daily tasks

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