This country was a young and struggling nation in the early 1800s when it made a tremendous breakthrough of the limiting bonds of weighing heavy loads. It had always been necessary to place loads on the platter of a balance. For large cart loads the load had to be removed from the cart and weighed by bundle or basket and then reloaded, a very tedious and time consuming process. But thanks to the American ingenuity of Thaddeus Fairbanks in 1830, things changed forever when he put levers underground, connected them to a steelyard beam set at the side of a ground level weighing platform. He called it a platform scale. The Fairbanks scale allowed an entire wagon full of product to be driven onto a platform at ground level. Because of the multiplying effect of the lever arms, the force transmitted to the steelyard was a small proportion of that on the platform. A sliding poise of no more than a few pounds could balance a load that weighed thousands of pounds.
展开▼
