Readers of Dan Kerr’s regular pieces in this magazine marvel at his ability to cobble together labor-saving devices using found materials. It’s a talent that mystifies the rest of us ordinary folk, just as we are mesmerized by people who can juggle or perform the Australian ‘ear stand.’ (It looks pretty much what it sounds like.) But there are an astounding number of after-market geniuses in rural Canada very much like Dan – by my calculations about one every square mile.
One of my high school teachers was an air force crewman who spent two years in a German POW camp where he shared a bunkhouse with the camp’s radio expert. They built tiny crystal radio sets that fit into a corned beef tin using found materials like a razor blade, thumbtacks and a safety pin. The radios were confiscated regularly by the guards but it was a matter of pride that they would have one going again in time to get the BBC news by 6 pm. He loved to tell the story of two of his colleagues who built a false wall in the top floor of Colditz Castle prison and put together a full-size glider plane made from scraps of wood. It took them two years to complete the bird and fortunately the Americans liberated the castle before the mad Brits had a chance to launch the glider over the River Mulde using a bathtub full of concrete dropping on a steel cable from the castle walls.
The Industrial Revolution got its start on small farms in England. Jethro Tull, a bored aristocrat with a lot of land an hour’s ride west of London invented his seed drill in the 18th century using cogs and fittings pounded out by his own blacksmith. Within a few short decades, all the mechanical processes that we still use today – the pulleys, cam shafts, ratchet gears, knotters and cutters – had all been invented and transformed planting and harvesting methods in a craft that had remained unchanged since Biblical times.
My own neighborhood achieved fame as the home of the self-steering manure spreader and The Cattleman’s Lance, a tool that allows a man seated on a tractor to open a gate and pass through without letting any cows come with him. My friend Terry Sheridan runs a machine shop in town. His son got interested in the business when he was five years old because Terry built him a miniature bulldozer to play on. It wasn’t that miniature because it weighed five hundred pounds and the lad could move the sandbox and all his toys pretty much anywhere he wanted. Peter Gredig, my editor for years at another farm magazine won first prize in the science fair at his high school in the 1970s because his father helped him build a corn dryer they towed to school behind the International 274. If you ever wondered why they impose height, width and weight restrictions on science projects, it’s because of Peter’s corn dryer.
My own boys were ruined for agriculture because of all the forced labor they endured tossing square bales and hoeing the garden on the ‘prison farm.’ But they both inherited the gene for dreaming up nifty ways to give themselves more spare time. Matt has a drone that lets us know without leaving the veranda where the sheep are at any moment and he has several sketches for laser-guided systems that will eliminate chores he loathes, like running the rototiller, mowing the lawn and catching chickens. Fortunately, like the Colditz glider, these innovations remain on the drawing board. I have a creation of my own, that Dan would approve. I invented the Larkspur Up and Away Hog Mover. It is a crate with room for two pigs and I place it on the barn floor underneath a beam. I throw two apples in the crate, the pigs go in, then I winch the crate up in the air three feet, back the trailer underneath and “Ta-da!” No farmers have been harmed.
We may not have a Hall of Fame to honor all the inventors of this valley. But even a newcomer can pick them out of a crowd because they all have a few marks on them and an obvious limp.