During the Civil War, Wisconsin farmers tried to grow sorghum, a substitute for sugar cane supplies cut off by the fighting. Refining it into syrup was unprofitable, however, and they gave it up until a UW-Madison faculty member came up with a solution. In 1880, new professor Magnus Swenson designed a prototype using centrifugal force to separate the syrup from the cane, with a spinning barrel to collect the extracted molasses.
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