John Deere

John Deere was an American blacksmith and manufacturer who transformed Midwestern farming with the self-scouring steel plow. Having emigrated from Vermont to Grand Detour, Illinois, to escape bankruptcy, he opened a blacksmith shop there in 1837 and fashioned a broken Scottish steel saw blade into a plow whose polished steel surface, unlike traditional iron or wooden plows, shed the region's sticky prairie soil instead of clogging with it. The innovation solved a problem that had held back cultivation of the Midwest's thick prairie sod, and demand grew quickly: the business he founded expanded from around 100 plows a year to more than 200 a month by 1849. The company he started grew into Deere and Company, later the world's largest agricultural machinery manufacturer, and the Smithsonian named his plow design one of the objects that changed American history.