The legend surrounding John Deere's "invention" of the steel plow has many elements of typical American folklore. Ostensibly, Deere took a piece of discarded steel blade from a commercial sawmill, chiseled off the teeth, and shaped the flat steel into a shining plowshare that would slide through thick, sticky prairie soil, creating long, straight furrows. Almost overnight, farmers discarded their old wrought iron plows for those manufactured from steel, thereby creating a revolution in American agriculture.

There are elements of truth in the story, but the actual creation of Deere's plow is somewhat more prosaic. Deere did, in fact, fashion his first plow from a piece of discarded steel. Knowing that midwestern farmers were having to stop frequently to clean off parts of their plows that were constantly being clogged by the heavy black humus they were trying to cultivate, Deere imagined that a plowshare (the cutting blade) and its attendant moldboard (the device that turned over the soil to create neat furrows for planting) might be more effective if made from a material that would resist such contamination. Already familiar with the properties of polished steel, Deere took advantage of the opportunity presented to him by reshaping the steel and fashioning the wooden handles and shafts himself. One of his principal innovations was to shape the moldboard into a parallelogram that permitted the farmer to turn the soil more easily as it was cut.

Properly speaking, however, Deere did not invent the steel plow; others had experimented with steel in constructing plows before Deere manufactured his instrument. His principal contribution was to create a plow that was effective in reducing the amount of clogging farmers experienced when plowing the rich prairie soil. Although the first plows Deere created have been lost, early versions still available suggest he often combined steel and wrought iron in his designs--probably depending on what materials he had available at the time. As he became more successful in his business, he was able to use more steel, which he obtained from mills in the eastern United States. An additional key to his success lay in the combination of inventiveness with a strong belief in the principle of constant improvement. Never fully satisfied with a product once he had begun to market it, Deere was continually consulting with farmers to learn how he might modify his plows to perform even better.

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