History of Engineering Historical Development of Agricultural Engineering

The evidences of the past from an agricultural engineering point of view are products made of iron. Moreover there are models, scriptures, pictures and movies. And there are memories of contemporary witnesses that would be lost if nobody recorded them. As manifold as is the number of topics in agricultural history as numerous is the number of protagonists in this field. In its voluntary activities the technical committee “Historical Development of Agricultural Engineering” in the VDI/MEG set out to facilitate the access to all of these treasures, both to the technically interested as well as to scientists that try to better understand the roots of designated developments. Museums, libraries, archives, clubs, institutions, manufacturers, collectors and „do-it-yourselfers” may join in this very difficult task. This is particularly important during digitization of all the sources of high value as only in this way the information acquisition, the established metadata system and the presentation, as well as the retrieval will be standardized and simplified. This paper will try to show what has already been achieved so far.