Joseph Oppenheim

Joseph Oppenheim (March 1, 1859 – November 24, 1901) was an educator who invented the modern widespread manure spreader that made farming less labor-intensive and far more efficient in the early 20th century, and only he is honored for that invention in the Ohio Agricultural Hall of Fame in Columbus, Ohio.

Born on March 1, 1859 in the small village of Kirchhundem, Germany. Oppenheim obtained a liberal education at universities in Bonn, Germany, and Innsbruck, Austria, and upon graduation from college at the age of 20 he immigrated to the United States. He received a teaching degree in 1881 from St. Francis College in Wisconsin and after briefly teaching in Putnam County, Ohio, he returned to St. Francis College for further study. On August 9, 1883 he married Anna Mary Ellerbrock of Glandorf, Ohio. He then taught in Freyburg, Ohio, New Albany, Indiana, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, before settling in the small town of Maria Stein, Ohio. Oppenheim was “an accomplished musician, specializing in piano and pipe organ, ... a remarkable scholar, conversant with four languages, well read in literature, and an excellent speaker.” As an educator, Oppenheim became the first teacher in Ohio to receive a Lifetime State Teachers Certificate.

In the 1890s, Oppenheim was a schoolmaster in the one-room country schoolhouse in Maria Stein, the town where John M. Kramer was building a “manure unloader” based on a patent in his name but claimed to be jointly owned by him, Fred Heckman and Henry Synck. Originally manure was thrown from a wagon. The unloader that Kramer built used a drag chain at the bottom of the wagon to pull the load of manure to the rear where it was shredded by a pair of beaters and deposited directly behind the machine, but with very little spreading to the sides. As a result, farmers still had to take the time-consuming step of heading into the fields with peg-tooth drags or similar implements to spread the manure in order to prevent burning the soil.

As a schoolmaster, Oppenheim was concerned that the older boys often missed class at certain times of the year to stay home and work on the farm, usually loading and spreading manure. Not only was the chore backbreaking, but it deprived them of their education which Oppenheim saw as a need for the future.

While watching children play a game called "tom ball," Oppenheim noticed that when the ball was struck with the bat, which was actually a paddle-shaped board, the ball was deflected to one side or the other, depending on the angle of the paddle. Oppenheim saw this paddle-effect as the solution to the problem of manure spreading. He felt that a series of paddles could be attached to the rear of a manure unloader to cast manure in a wide pattern several times the width of the wagon.

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