Great American Success Story

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I figure after Saturday night, all of us could use
a day off from Husker football. And since harvest season
is about done in Nebraska, I thought maybe you'd like
to hear about a great American this morning. Here goes.
By the time John had reached just his thirty third birthday,
he had almost lost all hope. Five hungry children in
a failed blacksmith shop in his native New England made

(00:22):
each day darker and darker for John. Like most he ran,
gathered up his wife and kids, left his debts, and,
like a lot of Americans, in eighteen thirty seven, he
headed west. Heard about the fertile ground in Illinois. Farmers
and wannabe farmers were said to be pouring into that state,
and surely they would need a hard working blacksmith. He

(00:43):
would take what he'd learn from failure and leverage it
into a fresh start. What the rumors left out about
this land of plenty is that it lies beneath long,
thick prairie grass, and if you did get to the dirt,
it was thick and sticky. When these wide eyed Easterners
tried to turn that dirt with a traditional scrap of
cast iron, it got stuck. The ground clung to it

(01:04):
like glue. He had to stop every five feet just
to scrape it off, and then that tin would crack
in half. Well after a ten hour day, even the
strongest would look behind it barely one furrow tilt, and
then hit the pedal that night with an aching back.
If you can't farm it, is it really America's most
fertile soil? Well John watched all of this and remembered

(01:25):
the sawmills back in Vermont and to how a polished
steel blade effortlessly cut through wood. Nothing ever stuck to it,
and it even stayed clean. What thought John, if the
farmer's plow was made of steel, not iron, would it
work on this stubborn dirt. He went looking for a
thick steel blade and found one, and then heated up

(01:46):
his forge, cooked the steel until it glowed like an
october pumpkin, and then carefully fashioned it into a curve
with a sharp point, let it cool, then polished it
till he could see his own reflection in the blade,
fastened it to a wooden frame, and went to find
a willing farmer, found one, and then said, hey, try this.

(02:07):
The skeptic hitched it to a mule cracked a whip,
and it took off, slicing through Illinois soil like a
battleship through the Pacific. That dirt slid off with ease.
The farmer dug one furrow, and then another and another,
no stopping. It even cleaned itself. Words spread. Suddenly farmers
from miles away came with cash in hand, took one

(02:28):
look and had to have one. That first year eighteen
thirty eight, John sold three of his miracle machines, Next
year one hundred, and then a thousand. Within twenty years
he was selling ten thousand a year. His factory was
filled with workers, but every day for the rest of
his life, John personally inspected every blade, experimented with different

(02:50):
sizes and shapes, but before it went out the door,
it had to have the boss's approval. Amazingly, John never
farmed a square inch himself, and he didn't invent the plow,
But in the greatest of American ingenuity, he saw a problem,
thought about how to solve it, and was relentless in
its pursuit. John wasn't Thomas Edison, the genius inventter Henry

(03:13):
Ford who perfected the yard of manufacturing. He was just
a simple blacksmith who found a better way. But it
wasn't just an invention. It changed the trajectory of the
American economy, opened the Great Plains to farming. History ranks
John's plow with a cotton gin and the light bulb
among the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century. Today, John's company,

(03:35):
nearly two hundred years old, is worth one hundred and
twenty five billion dollars with over eighty thousand employees worldwide,
And though he's been gone since eighteen eighty six, his
name is still on everything that comes off of his
assembly line with a slogan nothing runs like a Deer