Hero Tales from History — Cyrus H. M'cormick and the Story of the Reaper

Men soon began trying to talk without connecting wires.

Marconi invented the radio-telegraph in 1896 and the radio-phone followed.

Now it is possible to send wireless messages almost around the world.

CYRUS H.

M’CORMICK AND THE STORY OF THE REAPER

When little Abraham Lincoln was three days old in Kentucky, Cyrus H. McCormick was born in Virginia.

When the McCormick boy was seven he used to go out to a shed and watch his father working at a machine to take the place of the scythe which was then used in cutting grain.

Father McCormick was never satisfied, the neighbors said.

He was “always fussing and trying to invent and improve something.

” After working for years to make a machine to harvest grain, Farmer McCormick gave it up, saying that it could not be done.

Meanwhile young Cyrus, who had inherited his father’s inventive turn of mind, went to the fields to work with the men.

He found it very hard to keep up with them, so he invented a cradle, or improved scythe, which made his work so much easier that he was able to do as much as a grown man.

When he was twenty-two, Cyrus McCormick had invented a plough that would throw up a furrow on whichever side the farmer desired.

Two years later he made the first self-sharpening plough.

Although the neighbors had laughed at his father for being so foolish as to wish to invent a labor-saving machine for harvesting, and in spite of his father’s warnings that such a thing could never be made, the idea of a reaper haunted the young man’s mind.

He began to work at it as a boy and kept it up until he was a grown man.

He had improved the cradle and his two ploughs without much difficulty, but the reaping machine was a hard problem.

It was more difficult because the grain is often lodged, or matted down, and it is necessary not only to cut it but to lay it in even rows, so that it can be bound in sheaves ready for threshing.

But in 1831, the same year in which he made his double-furrow plough, McCormick built a machine that would reap quite well.

He had made every part of it by hand.

This machine had vibrating blades which cut against each other in about the same manner as shears.

It also had a reel to draw the standing grain within reach of the moving blades, and a platform to catch the grain as fast as it was cut.

He first tried the machine by reaping several acres of oats.

The next year he harvested seventy-five acres of wheat, to the great astonishment of the neighboring farmers, and his father’s pride.

Cyrus McCormick was not satisfied to let well enough alone.

He spent nine more years in making his reaper do everything just right before he was willing to sell it.

The farmers admired the clever machine, but they were not ready to buy it, because they thought it would take work from many laborers.

The money panic of 1837 occurred during this time, and young McCormick went into the iron-smelting business to make a living during the hard times.

[Illustration: CYRUS H. MCCORMICK, INVENTOR OF THE REAPER.

] [Illustration: MCCORMICK’S FIRST REAPER.

_From a model_] In 1840 he had put his reaper into more perfect shape and now began to manufacture it, first in Cincinnati, then in Chicago.

The farmers in the western prairies could not hire laborers enough to harvest their great fields of grain by hand.

So the McCormick reaper began to be used in that part of the country.

Cyrus H. McCormick, unlike most inventors, was a successful business man.

He had to enlarge his factories.

To his harvester he kept adding devices until it gathered the grain into sheaves, bound the sheaves with twine, and tossed them out sideways on the ground.

He made them so that they would mow grass also.

After his reapers and mowers became well known in America, the successful inventor and manufacturer went abroad to introduce them in Europe.

He showed the machine at the first World’s Fair in London, in 1851. People in England laughed, and the London _Times_ reported that the reaper was a “cross between a chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine.

” But when the object of their laughter was taken out harvesting in England, the joke was on the men who had made fun of a machine they could not understand.

The newspapers then began to praise the inventor they had ridiculed, and Cyrus H. McCormick awoke one morning and found himself famous.

He not only received the Great Medal from the World’s Fair, but was elected an officer of the Legion of Honor in Paris, and received the high honor of being made a member of the French Academy of Science.