The race to invent the first mechanical orange harvester
was on.
Dreams and designs for a mechanized citrus picker had been
bandied about since the 1940s. But back then, it was
science fiction stuff. Anyone who seriously thought it
could be done was a laughing-stock.
Near the turn of the millennium, Florida's postcard orange
groves had exploded into a six-billion-dollar-a-year
industry. Meanwhile, technology had marched. Nobody was
laughing anymore. A functional harvester seemed just
around the corner. The state's top citrus barons were now
so rich that they had almost everything they wanted. They
were unhappy. They wanted to be as rich as oil people. A
mechanical picker would do that.
Research teams from various nations labored at a feverish
pace. Work proceeded in secret, along several different
lines. The Swedes were considered to have the lead,
advancing the spike-and-drum technique. The Germans placed
their bets on hundreds of mechanical arms with spring-
action picking fingers. The French used a shake-and-catch
design with hydraulic trunk-grabber and retractable
manganese skirt. The Japanese were working on something
called the Centipede, which nobody knew anything about.
All four teams soon had models up and running. That was
the easy part. The last big hurdle was efficiency. Every
prototype up to now had either left too many oranges on
the tree or squashed too much in the process. They had
long since mastered the proverbial low-hanging fruit. The
real test now was clean canopy penetration. The barons set
a tolerance standard of ninety-five percent. The teams
redoubled their efforts, improving performance, everyone
getting closer. These were exciting times.
In January, the Japanese were rumored to have caught the
Swedes. Competition became brutal. Engineers went without
sleep, safety steps eliminated. Hammering could be heard
from the German lab late into the night. The French
argued. It was anyone's ball game.
Then, on a sunny spring day in 1997, word went out like a
cannon shot. A prototype was ready. Dozens of limos
quietly converged on a remote grove near the center of the
state. Nothing but orange trees in all directions. There
was a VIP tent, paddle fans, champagne on ice.
Just outside the tent, at the edge of the trees, a huge
object sat under a white sheet. The German team approached
the podium. Ludwig, head of design, leaned to the
microphone.
"Behold! Der Shleimerhocken GroveMaster Z500."
Someone yanked the sheet, which flew off the device and
fluttered to the ground.
The audience gasped.
A large, intricate cylinder imbedded with innumerable
jointed metal arms and razor claws fanning in all
directions, the gene splice of a carnival ride and Edward
Scissorhands. A German flag on the side. The anticipation
was unbearable. Ludwig walked to the GroveMaster,
dramatically throwing a switch on the side, and it fell
over, crushing him.
The Germans had a drawing board, and they went back to it.
Work continued tirelessly. Various models and upgrades
rolled out. Limos driving into the groves every few
months, the barons increasingly bitter, the parade of
failures reminiscent of newsreel footage from the early
days of aviation -- the plane with the collapsing stack of
eight wings, the bouncing helicopter-car, the man in bat
wings jumping off a suspension bridge and flying like an
anvil, the guy with ice skates and a rocket pack, who had
to be extinguished with snowballs.
Word leaked out, bad press. Testing was moved to Clermont,
for historic symbolism. The demonstration site was in the
shadow of the world-famous Citrus Tower, built in 1955 in
the rich-soiled, rolling grovelands where it had all
started. At least they used to be grovelands. Most of it
had been bulldozed for sprawling developments of identical
homes and screened-in pools built on top of each other. It
was enough to make a baron cry. They needed a harvester
now!
The French were next. "Gentlemen -- I give you zee
Terminator."
The sheet flew off.
A War of the Worlds contraption stood on spider legs. A
man named Jacques picked up a radio control box and
pressed a button. Yellow lights that looked like eyes came
on. The device began chugging. Smoke puffed out a chimney.
Jacques turned a dial. The machine chugged faster,
springing on the spider legs. He turned the dial some
more. The legs started clomping up and down, slowly at
first, then at a brisk, running-in-place clip.
Jacques moved the joystick on his box. The device began
running. The wrong way. It ripped up the spectator tent,
flattening chairs and upending the punch bowl. Barons and
politicians scattered through the groves, the Terminator
running amok. It cornered one of the barons against a
Cyclone fence and seized him around the waist with the
hydraulic trunk-grabber, lifting him off the ground and
squeezing until he squirted stuff. Then it shook the limp
body a few times before dropping it in the self-cleaning
metal skirt.
Talk about a setback. But there were others. A new and
improved GroveMaster exploded in the German lab,
unpleasant news photos of men fleeing in burning lab
coats. A militant migrant group dynamited the Swedish lab.
Then the French blew up their own lab with cooking sherry.
But so close! Can't stop now. Work continued through the
winter with smudge pots, icicles on the trees. Toes had to
be amputated. Finally, spring again.
The Japanese were ready.
The barons had decided to move to the top of the Citrus
Tower and watch through binoculars.
"Gentlemen -- the Centipede!"
The sheet came off.
The Centipede ripped down three rows of trees, then left
the grove and took off in the direction of town. The
barons' binoculars swung around to the west side of the
tower, toward the distant screams.
The resulting public outcry got the state into the act.
The foreign labs were closed down and a domestic
contractor brought in. The contractor was well connected
with state government. It had previously only stamped out
interstate highway signs at twenty thousand dollars each
but was able to convince officials that the technology was
interchangeable. An appointed board quickly approved the
no-bid contract. Work resumed.
The accidents stopped but not progress. It went backward.
Picking efficiency dropped below sixty percent for the
first time since 1980. Everything got behind schedule.
Cost overruns, redundant parts, the device mutating into
unworkable configurations without apparent design or goal.
But political contributions were up, and the Florida
Robotic Harvester program was considered a smashing
success.
The barons were furious. They called in their own markers,
and the state met behind closed doors to strike a
compromise. It would offer the contractor an incentive. A
harvester would be worth tens of millions of dollars a
year to a private inventor. If it was made by a contractor
working for the taxpayers, however, those rights reverted
to the state. The deal: develop a functional prototype by
the fall and keep all proceeds for the first three years.
It was a fifty-million-dollar carrot. Everyone agreed.
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