John Ridley credited for creating grain stripper, a world-first saviour of the South Australian harvests from 1840s

John Ridley, from a lithographic print portrait by Ida S. Perrin, and his grain stripper machine invention.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia

John Ridley, miller and preacher, is best known for inventing the stripper machine that removed the heads of grain. Although Ridley won the prize offered by South Australia's Agricultural and Horticultural Society, others credit Mount Barker farmer John Wrathall Bull as the inventor of what has been claimed as a world first.

Born in Country Durham, England, Ridley, at 15, took over the milling business of his father who’d died when his son was five. With little formal education, he had a remarkable memory and a love of books, especially on science and technology. He began church preaching at 18.

After his mother's death in 1835, Ridley sailed for South Australia with his wife and two infant children, arriving in 1840. He bought land at Hindmarsh near Adelaide, took over the South Australian Company flour mill, installed the first steam engine (a Watt’s beam) in South Australia to cut wood and grind meal, and began growing wheat at Hindmarsh.

Anticipating the heavy spending by the colony’s governor George Gawler would lead to both depression and more rural production, Ridley sought grain for his mill, bought land, and invested in the Burra Burra copper mining. By 1843, the colony's wheat crop threatened to exceed the harvest workforce. Ridley devised a method of harvesting wheat with a reaper based on a woodcut in John Claudius Loudon’s An Encyclopaedia of Agriculture.

In 1843, the colony’s corn exchange committee offered £40 but failed to attract a suitable a model or plans for a reaper. Ridley didn’t compete because his machine was nearly ready in the factory of John Stokes Bagshaw. In 1843, Ridley's machine was tested on his tenant’s crop, reaping 70 acres in a week. Over the next year, he improved the machine and, by 1850, more than 50 were operating in the colony and others had been exported.

Although Ridley’s returns from the harvesting machine were large, they were meagre compared with dividends from his original shares in the Burra copper mine, his flour mill and his land investments. He and his family later returned to live in England where indulged “his eccentric enthusiasm to invention and religion”