Rupert Sargent Holland

The same sturdy pioneer stock that gave America Daniel Boone and Lincoln, Robert Fulton and Andrew Jackson, produced the inventor of the reaper. He came of a line of resourceful, fearless Scotch-Irish settlers, bone of the bone and sinew of the sinew of those generations that laid the broad foundations of the United States. His great-grandfather had been an Indian fighter in the colony of Pennsylvania, his grandfather had moved to Virginia and fought in the Revolution, and his father had built a log-house and tilled a farm in that strip of arable Virginia land that lay between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains. He prospered, and added neighboring farms to his original holding; he had two grist-mills, two sawmills, a blacksmith shop, a smelting-furnace, and a distillery; he invented new makes of farm machinery, and in addition was a man of considerable reading, able to hold his own in discussion with the lawyers and the clergymen of the countryside. He was of that same well-developed type of countryman of whom so many were to be found in the thirteen original states and the borderlands to the west, that settler type which was the real backbone of the young country.

The McCormick house and farm was almost a small village in itself. There were eight children, and their shoes were cobbled, their clothes woven, their very beds and chairs and tables built at home. Whatever was needed could be done, the family were always busy within doors or without, and the spirit of helpfulness and invention was in the air. Into such a setting Cyrus Hall McCormick was born in 1809, the same year that saw the birth of Lincoln.

He went to one of the Old Field Schools, so called because it was built on ground that had been abandoned for farm use. He learned what other boys and girls were learning in simple country schools, but he studied harder than most of them, because he had a keen desire to understand thoroughly whatever subject he started. He saw his father busy in his workshop at all spare moments, and he took him as a pattern. After weeks of work he brought his teacher a remarkably exact map of the world, drawn to scale, and outlined in ink on paper pasted on linen, and fastened on two rollers. The work showed his ingenious fancy, and perhaps determined his father to have him educated as a surveyor. At eighteen he began this study, and had soon won a good reputation in the neighborhood as an engineer. Much of the time he spent in the fields with his father, and here he soon learned that reaping wheat was no easy task, and that swinging a wheat cradle under the summer sun was hard on both the temper and the back.

Many men had tried to lighten the farmer’s labor in cutting grain, and Cyrus McCormick’s father had long had the ambition to invent a reaper. He had succeeded in building a cumbersome machine that was pushed at the back by a pair of horses. The plan of the machine was well enough; it consisted of a row of short curved sickles that were fastened to upright posts. Revolving rods drove the wheat up against the sickles. The machine acted properly, but the grain would not. Instead of standing up straight and separated to be cut the wheat would more often come in great bunches, twisting about the sickles and getting tangled in the machinery. Mr. McCormick tried the machine in the harvesting of 1816, but it would not work, and had to be carted away to the workshop as an invention gone wrong. But he persevered with this idea, and from time to time built other models. After a number of years he brought forth a machine that would cut, but left the wheat after cutting in a badly tangled shape. He saw that this was not sufficient. The reaper to be of real use must dispose of the grain properly as well as shear the stalks.

Cyrus now took up the work that his father reluctantly abandoned. He decided to build his reaper on entirely new lines. First he dealt with the problem of how to separate the grain that was to be cut from that which was to be left standing. This he finally solved by adding a curved arm, or divider, to the end of his reaper’s blade. In this way the grain that was to be cut would be properly fed to the knife.

But the grain was apt to be badly tangled before the reaper reached it, and his machine must be able to cut that which was pressed down and out of shape as well as that which was standing straight. To accomplish this he decided that his knife must have two motions, one a forward cut, and the other sideways. He tried many plans before he finally hit upon one that solved this for him. It was a straight knife blade that moved forward and backward, cutting with each motion. This idea became known as the reciprocating blade.

Yet even though the machine could divide the grain properly, and the knife cut with a double motion, there was the possibility that the blade might simply press the grain down and so slide over it. This was especially apt to be the case after a rain, or when the grain had been badly blown about by the wind. The problem now was how to hold it upright. He found the solution lay in adding a row of indentations that projected a few inches from the edge of the knife, and acted like fingers in catching the stalks and holding them in place to be cut.

These three ideas, the divider, the reciprocating blade, and the fingers, were all fundamental devices of the machine Cyrus McCormick was building. They all met the question of how the grain could be cut. To these he next added a revolving reel, that would lift any grain that had fallen and straighten it, and a platform to catch the grain as it was cut and fell. His idea was that a man should walk along beside the reaper and rake off the grain as it fell upon the platform.

Two more devices, and his first machine was completed. One was to have the shafts placed on the outside of the reaper, or so that the horse would pull it sideways, instead of having to push it, as had been the case with his father’s model. The other was to have the whole machine practically operated by one big wheel, which should bear the weight and move the knife and the reel.

It had taken young McCormick many months to work out all these problems, and there were only one or two weeks each year, the harvest weeks, when he could actually try his machine. He wanted to use it in the spring of 1831, but he found that the work of finishing all the necessary details was enormous. He begged his father to leave a small patch of wheat for him to try to cut, and at last, one day in July of that year, he drove his cumbersome machine into the field. All his family watched as the reaper headed toward the grain. They saw the wheat gathered and swept down upon the knife, they saw the blade move back and forth and cut the grain, and then saw it fall upon the little platform. The machine worked with hitches, not nearly so smoothly nor so efficiently as it should, but it did work; it gathered the grain in and it left it in good shape to be raked off the platform. The trial proved that such a machine could be made to do the work, and that was all that the inventor wanted.

He drove it back to his workshop and made certain changes in the reel and the divider. Then, several days later, he drove it over to the little settlement at Steele’s Tavern, and cut six acres of oats in one afternoon. That was a marvelous feat, and caused great wonder in the countryside, but the harvesting season had ended, and the inventor would have to wait a year before he could prove the use of his machine again.

By the next year McCormick was ready for a larger audience. The town of Lexington lay some eighteen miles south of his home, and he made arrangements with a farmer there, named John Ruff, to give an exhibition of his reaper in the latter’s field. Over a hundred people were present when McCormick arrived, all curious to see what could be done with the complicated-looking machine. Many of them were harvesters themselves, and none too eager to see a mechanical device enter into competition for their work. The field was hilly and rough, and the reaper careened about in it like a ship in a gale. The farmer grew indignant, and protested that McCormick would ruin all his wheat, and the laborers began to jeer and joke at the machine’s expense. The exhibition gave every sign of proving a failure when one of the spectators called out that he owned the next field and would be glad to give McCormick a chance there. This field was level, and the young man quickly turned his reaper into it. Before sunset he had cut six acres of wheat, and convinced his audience that his machine was a great improvement over the old method. That evening he drove the reaper to the court-house square and explained its working to the towns people. Very few of them saw how it was to revolutionize the farmer’s labor, but one or two did. Professor Bradshaw, of the local academy, studied the machine, and then stated publicly that in his opinion, “This machine is worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

The Earliest Reaper

But if Cyrus McCormick had been fortunate in growing up on a farm where he could study the problem of cutting grain at first hand he was now to find that he was not so fortunate when it came to building other reapers and marketing them. His home was four days’ travel from Richmond. He must have money to get the iron for his machines, to advertise, and to pay agents to try to sell them. He had very little money. He did advertise in the Lexington Union in September, 1833, offering reapers for sale at fifty dollars; but there were no answers to his advertisements. So skeptical were the farmers that it was seven years before one bought a reaper of him. But he had faith enough in his invention to take out a patent on it in 1834.

Until now McCormick had depended on the farm for his livelihood, but there was little profit in this, and he turned his attention to a deposit of iron ore in the neighborhood, and built a furnace and began to make iron. This succeeded until the panic of 1837 reached the Virginia country and brought debt and lowered prices with it. Cyrus surrendered his farm and what other property he had to his creditors. None of them was sufficiently interested in the crude reaper to consider it worth taking.

But the inventor hung on to his faith in this machine, although no one appeared to buy it, and the expense he had gone to in making it had practically bankrupted him. And his faith met with its reward, for one day in 1840 a stranger rode up to the door of his workshop and offered fifty dollars for a reaper. He had seen one of the machines on exhibition, and had decided to try[Pg 195]
[Pg 196] it. A little later two other farmers who lived on the James River appeared and gave McCormick two more orders. He had the satisfaction of knowing that in the harvest of 1840 three of his reapers were having a trying out.

The next year he was busy trying to perfect a blade that would cut wet grain. This took him weeks of experimenting, but at last he found that a serrated edge of a certain pattern would produce the effect he wanted. He added this to the new machines he was building, fixed the price of the reaper at one hundred dollars, and in 1842 sold seven machines, in 1843 twenty-nine, and in 1844 fifty. At last he had justified himself, and the log workshop had become a busy factory.

An invention of such great value to the farmer naturally advertised itself through the country districts. Men who heard of a machine that would cut one hundred and seventy-five acres of wheat in less than eight days—as happened in one case—naturally decided that it was worth investigating. And those who already owned machines saw a chance to make money by selling to their neighbors. One man paid McCormick $1,333 for the reaper agency of eight counties, another $500 for the right in five other counties, and a business man offered $2,500 for the agency in southern Virginia. Meantime orders were coming in from the distant states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, and the little home factory was being pushed to the utmost.

But it was not only difficult to obtain the necessary materials for building reapers on the remote Virginia farm, it was almost impossible to ship the machines ordered in time for the harvests. Those that went west had to be taken by wagon to Scottsville, sent down the canal to Richmond, put on shipboard for the long journey down the James River to the Atlantic and so by ocean to New Orleans, changed there to a river steamer that should take them up the Mississippi and by the Ohio River to the distributing point of Cincinnati. Many delays might happen in such a long trip, and many delays did happen, and in several cases the reapers did not reach the farmers who had ordered them until long after the harvesting season was over. McCormick saw that he must build his reapers in a more central place.

At that time labor was very scarce in the great central region of the country, and the farms were enormous. The wheat was going to waste, for there were not enough scythes and sickles to cut it. McCormick started on a trip through the middle West, and what he saw convinced him that his reaper would soon be an absolute necessity on every farm. All he needed was to find the best point for building his machines and shipping them. He studied this matter with the greatest care, and finally decided that the strategic place was the little town of Chicago, situated on one of the Great Lakes, and half-way between the prairies of the West and the commercial depots and factories of the eastern seaboard.

Chicago in 1847 was still little more than a frontier town. It had fought gamely with floods and droughts, with cholera and panics, with desperadoes and with land thieves. But men saw that it was bound to grow, for railroads would have to come to bring the wheat and others to carry it away, and that meant that some day it would be a great metropolis. McCormick, like most of the other business builders who were streaming into Chicago, only wanted credit to enable him to build and sell his goods, and he was fortunate enough to find a rich and prominent citizen named William B. Ogden, who was ready to give him credit and enter into partnership with him.

Ogden gave McCormick $25,000 for a half interest in the business of making reapers, and started at once to build a factory. At last the inventor was firmly established. He arranged to sell five hundred reapers for the harvest of 1848, and as one after another was sent out into the great wheat belts and set up and tried, the farmers who saw them decided that the reapers spelled prosperity for them. The business grew, and at the end of two years, when the partners found it wiser to dissolve their firm, McCormick was able to tell Ogden that he would pay him back the $25,000 that he had invested, and give him $25,000 more for interest and profits. Ogden accepted, and McCormick became sole owner of the business.

Cyrus McCormick was not only an inventor, but a business-builder of the rarest talent, one of the great pioneers in a field that was later to be cultivated in the United States to a remarkable degree. He knew he had a machine that would lessen labor and increase wealth wherever wheat was grown, and he felt that it was his mission to see that the reaper should do its share in the progress of the world. In that sense he was more than a mere business man; but in another sense he was a gigantic business-builder. Just as he had studied the problem of cutting wheat with the object of producing the most efficient machine possible, so he now studied the problem of selling his reapers in such a way that every farmer should own one. He believed in liberal advertising, and he had posters printed with a picture of the reaper at the top, and below it a formal guarantee warranting the machine’s performance absolutely. There was a space beneath this for the signature of the farmer who bought, and the agent who sold, and two witnesses. The price of the reaper was one hundred and twenty dollars, and the buyer paid down thirty dollars, and the balance at the end of six months, provided the reaper would cut one and a half acres an hour, and fulfil the other requirements. This guarantee, with a chance to obtain the money back if the purchase was unsatisfactory, was a new idea, and appealed to every one as a most sincere and honorable way of doing business. More than this, he sold for a fixed price, which was in many respects a new method of selling, and he printed in newspapers and farm journals letters he had received from farmers telling of their satisfaction with the reaper. In these new ways he laid the foundation of an enormous business.

The rush to the gold fields of California in 1849 and the resulting settlement of the far western country made Chicago even more central than it had been before. But, although the advertisements of the McCormick reaper were scattered everywhere, many farmers would put off buying until the harvesting season had almost come, and when it was too late to get the machines from the central factory. Therefore McCormick had agents and built warehouses in every farming district, and these agents were given a free rein in their own locality, their instructions being to see that every farmer who needed a reaper was given the easiest opportunity to get one. The price was a fixed one, but McCormick was patient with the purchasers. He gave them a chance to pay for the reapers with the proceeds of their harvests. He held that it was better that he should wait for the money than that the farmers should lack the machines that would enable them to make the most of their fields of grain. “I have never yet sued a farmer for the price of a reaper,” he stated in 1848, and he held to that policy as steadfastly as he could. As a result he soon gained the farmers’ confidence, and his name became identified with square, and even with lenient, dealing with all classes of purchasers. He lost little by it, and in the long run the wide-spread advertising of this policy of business proved an invaluable asset.

It is not to be supposed that no rival reapers were put upon the market. Many were, and to meet some of these McCormick made use of what became known as the Field Test. He would instruct his agents to issue invitations to his rivals to meet him in competition. Then the different makes of reapers would show how many acres of grain they could cut in an afternoon before an audience of the neighboring farmers. Judges were appointed to decide as to the merits of the different machines, and in most of the tests McCormick’s reaper outdistanced all its rivals. In one such meeting it is said that forty machines competed. Such shows were the best possible form of advertising, but in time they degenerated into absurd performances. Trick machines of unwieldy strength were built secretly, and reapers were driven into growths of young trees, and were fastened together and then pulled apart to prove which was the stronger. At last it was realized that the field tests were no longer fair, and McCormick gave them up.

So important an invention as the reaper was certain to have many improvements made to it. For a number of years, however, the only additions that were made to the original model were seats for the driver and raker. The machine did the work of the original man with the sickle or scythe and that of the cradler, and having cut the grain left it in loose piles on the ground. But it still had to be raked up and bound, and a number of inventors were busy trying to perfect mechanical devices that would do this work too. A man named Jearum Atkins invented a contrivance that was called the “Iron Man,” which was a post fastened to the reaper, having two iron arms that swept round and round and brushed the grain from the platform as fast as it was cut and had fallen. This plan was very clumsy, but improvements were made so rapidly that by 1860 the market was filled with various patterns of self-raking reapers.

The problem of binding the grain was more difficult. This had always been hard labor, taking a great deal of time and requiring three or four men to every reaper. The first step toward a self-binder was the addition of a foot-board at the back of the reaper, on which a man might stand and fasten the grain into sheaves as it fell. This was a little better than the old method, but only a little. It took less time, but it was still very hard and slow work.

McCormick was deep in a study of this matter when one day a man named James Withington came to him from Wisconsin, and announced that he had a machine that could automatically bind grain. McCormick had been working night and day over his own plan, and when the inventor began to explain he fell asleep. When he woke, Withington had left. McCormick at once sent one of his men to the inventor’s Wisconsin home, and, with many apologies, begged him to come back. Withington did, and showed McCormick a wonderful machine, one made of two arms of steel that would catch each bundle of grain, pass a wire about it and twist the ends of the wire, cut it loose, and throw it to the ground. Here was an invention that would more than double the usefulness of the reaper, and one that seems quite as remarkable as the reaper itself. McCormick at once contracted with Withington for this binder, and tried it on an Illinois farm the following July. It worked perfectly, cutting fifty acres of grain and binding it into sheaves. At last only one person was needed to harvest the wheat, the one who sat upon the driver’s seat and simply had to guide the horses. A small boy or girl could do all the work that it had taken a score of men to accomplish twenty years before.

Now it seemed as if the reaper was complete, and nothing could be added to increase its efficiency. McCormick had seen to it that the whirr of his machine was heard in every wheat field of the United States, and was busily extending the reign of the reaper to the great grain districts of Russia, India, and South America. Then, in the spring of 1880, William Deering built and sold 3,000 self-binding machines that used twine instead of wire to fasten the sheaves, and as the news of this novelty spread the farmers declared that the wire of the old binders had cut their hands, had torn their wheat, had proved hard to manage in the flour-mills, and that henceforth they must have twine-binders.

McCormick realized that he must give the farmers what they demanded, and he looked about for a man who could invent a new method of binding with twine. He found him in Marquis L. Gorham, who perfected a new twine-binder, and added a device by which all the sheaves bound were turned out in uniform size. By the next year McCormick was pushing his Gorham binder on the market, and the farmers who had wavered in their allegience to his reaper were returning to the McCormick fold.

The battle of rival reapers had been long and costly. From the building of his factory in Chicago McCormick had been engaged in continuous lawsuits with competitors. His original patent had expired in 1848, and he had used every effort to have it extended. The battle was fought through the lower courts, through the Supreme Court, and in Congress. The greatest lawyers of the time were retained on one side of the reaper struggle or the other. His rivals combined and raised a great fund to defeat his claims. He spent a fortune, but his patents were not renewed, and competition was thrown wide open. With the invention of the twine-binder the patent war burst out afresh, and again the courts were called upon for decisions between the rivals. But by now the competition had become so keen and the cost of manufacturing so heavy that the field dwindled quickly. When the war over the twine-binder ended there were only twenty-two competing firms left; before that there had been over a hundred.

The reaper had been primarily necessary in America, because here farm labor was very scarce, and the wheat fields enormously productive. In fact the growth of the newly opened Western country must have been indefinitely retarded if men had had to cut the grain by hand and harvest it in the primitive manner. The reaper was a very vital factor in the development of that country, and McCormick deserved the credit of being one of the greatest profit-builders of the land.

In Europe and Asia labor was plentiful, and the reaper had to win its way more slowly. McCormick showed his machine at the great international exhibitions and gradually induced the large landowners to consider it. Practical demonstration proved its value, and it made its appearance in the fields of European Russia and Siberia, in Germany and France and the Slavic countries, in India, Australia, and the Argentine, and at last wherever wheat was to be cut. It trebled the output of grain, and the welfare of the people has proven largely dependent on their food supply. It has been an invention of the greatest economic value to the world.