Jethro Tull invented the first practical seed drill in the early eighteenth century. His was one of half a dozen inventions which basically put the nail into the coffin of the old land tenancy arrangements over time and led to the enclosures, because to make the use of expensive machinery economical you needed a lot of land. Tull's drill wasn't really taken up for another century, and by then a bunch of other inventors had come up with something very similar. Tull wrote a book on good agricultural practice in the 1730s, describing, amongst other things, how his drill worked. Many of the subsequent drills seem to have been based on that information. He also described how you could make soil fertile by "pulverising" it. Experience "showed" that he had this right, but nowadays it is assumed that his apparent success with mechanical hoeing was more to do with the fact that he was suppressing the weeds which crowded the wheat plants out.
Now, that's what I call living in the past ...
