Henry Synck

Henry Synck, Jr. was an American industrialist who participated in the development of mechanized farming.

In the farming communities of Ohio, fertilization of fields was possible only by the distribution of animal excrement, usually mixed with bedding straw to create a semi-solid mixture of manure. The task of shoveling and distributing the manure was backbreaking and there were many attempts made to mechanize this process. One such example was a patent by a Daniel Merrell in 1886 for a mechanized "manure spreader". There were a number of other patent filings prior to the onset of the 20th century. In 1899 John M Kramer, Fred Heckman and Henry Synck, Jr., all of whom lived in the small farming community of Maria Stein, OH were awarded a patent for a device to spread manure which they named a "manure distributor". Synck subsequently worked with his future father-in-law, Joseph Oppenheim, to develop the first practical manure spreader. Oppenheim's 1900 invention was so successful that it spawned a major manufacturing company, the New Idea Spreader Works, later renamed the New Idea Farm Machinery Company in 1899. New Idea celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1999 as a division of AGCO. Synck's role in the evolution of manure spreader and other farm machinery technology is well documented by a steady stream of patents that not only describe improvements to the manure spreader, but also other farm machinery from 1899 to 1939.

Henry Synck, Jr. was born in Saint Sebastian, Ohio. He married Wilhelmina Oppenheim, the daughter of Joseph Oppenheim, a teacher in Maria Stein, Ohio. In 1899 Synck's father-in law, Joseph Oppenheim invented the most important component of the first practical mechanical manure spreader. Oppenheim conceived the idea of a practical manure spreader during a game of paddle ball. He noted that "when a player held the paddle-shaped bat at an angle, a foul ball resulted, with the ball careening off at the angle dictated by the paddle. Why not, pondered Oppenheim, make manure do the same thing—fly out at an angle from a series of paddles?" Earlier patent ideas, including that described by Kramer, Heckman and Synck (above) had a distributive mechanism that was flawed in that the width of distribution was relatively narrow. Oppenheim subsequently developed a model from a cigar box and demonstrated the feasibility of distributing manure in a "wide spread pattern". Oppenheim's patent clearly describes the distribution mechanism Manure was loaded into the spreader. A mechanism moved the manure to the rear where it was distributed by paddles.

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