Inventions in Everything: Beating Plowshares into Artillery

The U.S. Civil War was a pivotal period for innovation within the United States. In no small measure, the conflict accelerated the country’s shift from an agrarian to an industrial society.

Coming out of a time of warfare, many Civil War’s notable innovations focused on potential military applications. On that count, C.M. French and W.H. Fancher’s innovation does not disappoint. U.S. Patent 35,600 brings the fight to the farm in the form of a small cannon built into a farmer’s horse- or oxen-pulled plow. Figures 1 and 2 from the patent’s illustrations, which we’ve colorized, show their concept for combining combat and field planting.

French and Fancher describe the aim of their invention in the patent:

The object of our invention is to produce a plow equal, if not superior, in point of strength and lightness to that implement as ordinarily made, and at the same time to combine in its construction the elements of light ordnance, so that when the occasion offers it may do valuable service in the capacity of both implements.

Better still, they describe how their concept reshaping a plowshare into proverbial sword for combat might be deployed:

As a piece of light ordnance its capacity may vary from a projectile of one to three pounds weight without rendering it cumbersome as a plow. Its utility as an implement of the twofold capacity described is unquestionable, especially when used in border localities, subject to savage feuds and guerrilla warfare. As a means of defense in repelling surprises and skirmishing attacks on those engage in a peaceful avocation it is unrivaled, as it can be immediately brought into action by disengaging the team, and in times of danger may be used in the field, ready charted with its deadly missiles of ball or grape. The share serves to anchor it firmly in the ground and enables it to resist the recoil, while the hand-levers A furnish convenient means of giving it the proper direction.

This combination enables those in agricultural pursuits to have at hand an efficient weapon of defense at a very slight expense in addition to that of a common and indispensible [sic] implement, and one that is hardly inferior as regards the means of moving, planting, and directing to that of expensive light ordnance on wheels.

U.S. Patent 36,500 isn’t the only example of a firearm being mounted onto a farmer’s plowshare. The patent makes clear the invention is an “improvement in combined plow and gun”, which means there were other examples of this kind of field artillery that came before it, though we didn’t find any similarly patented inventions predating it in the U.S. Patent Office’s database.

We also didn’t find any contemporary accounts of armored plows being used in combat during the conflict, but can only imagine the sheer number of gophers that met their end after finding themselves on the business end of French and Fancher’s plow.

From the Inventions in Everything Archives

The IIE team has previously covered one other plow related innovation, a truly innovative snowplow:

• There Is No Great Snowplow Stagnation