#30: 20 Mule Team Drawn Farm Combine, Washington, 1941

What’s really pretty cool about technology and progress is that the invention of various tools that assist in all kinds of human activity isn’t exactly linear. For example, in this picture from Washington in 1941, we have a farm combine drawn by twenty mules used to harvest some sort of crop.

Now, our modern minds assume that a combine was a stand-alone invention that came into being only when all the necessary parts could be acquired. Yet, in this case, the harvesting technology was easily found much earlier than the appropriate engine, and thus, we get the strange sight of a mule-drawn combine.