"No, your Excellency," came the reply."They can be made only in America."The old man gave a sigh."Those Yankees are ingenious fellows,"he said."This is a wonderful machine."
In this story of American success, four names stand out preeminently.The men who made the greatest contributions were Cyrus H.McCormick, C.W.Marsh, Charles B.Withington, and John F.Appleby.The name that stands foremost, of course, is that of McCormick, but each of the others made additions to his invention that have produced the present finished machine.It seems like the stroke of an ironical fate which decreed that since it was the invention of a Northerner, Eli Whitney, that made inevitable the Civil War, so it was the invention of a Southerner, Cyrus McCormick, that made inevitable the ending of that war in favor of the North.McCormick was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on a farm about eighteen miles from Staunton.He was a child of that pioneering Scotch-Irish race which contributed so greatly to the settlement of this region and which afterward made such inestimable additions to American citizenship.The country in which he grew up was rough and, so far as the conventionalities go, uncivilized; the family homestead was little more than a log cabin; and existence meant a continual struggle with a not particularly fruitful soil.The most remarkable figure in the McCormick home circle, and the one whose every-day life exerted the greatest influence on the boy, was his father.The older McCormick had one obsessing idea that made him the favorite butt of the local humorists.He believed that the labor spent in reaping grain was a useless expenditure of human effort and that machinery might be made to do the work.Other men, in this country and in Europe, had nourished similar notions.Several Englishmen had invented reaping machines, all of which had had only a single defect--they would not reap.An ingenious English actor had developed a contrivance which would cut imitation wheat on the stage, but no one had developed a machine that would work satisfactorily in real life.Robert McCormick spent the larger part of his days and nights tinkering at a practical machine.He finally produced a horrific contrivance, made up of whirling sickles, knives, and revolving rods, pushed from behind by two horses; when he tried this upon a grain-field, however, it made a humiliating failure.
Evidently Robert McCormick had ambitions far beyond his powers;yet without his absurd experiments the development of American agriculture might have waited many years.They became the favorite topics of conversation in the evening gatherings that took place about the family log fire.Robert McCormick had several sons, and one manifested a particular interest in his repeated failures.From the time he was seven years old Cyrus Hall McCormick became his father's closest companion.Others might ridicule and revile, but this chubby, bright-eyed, intelligent little boy was always the keenest listener, the one comfort which the father had against his jeering neighbors.He also became his father's constant associate in his rough workshop.Soon, however, the older man noticed a change in their relations.The boy was becoming the teacher, and the father was taught.By the time Cyrus was eighteen, indeed, he had advanced so far beyond his father that the latter had become merely a proud observer.Young McCormick threw into the discard all his father's ideas and struck out on entirely new lines.By the time he had reached his twenty-second birthday he had constructed a machine which, in all its essential details, is the one which we have today.He had introduced seven principles, all of which are an indispensable part of every reaper constructed now.One afternoon he drove his unlovely contraption upon his father's farm, with no witnesses except his own family.This group now witnessed the first successful attempt ever made to reap with machinery.A few days later young McCormick gave a public exhibition at Steele's Tavern, cutting six acres of oats in an afternoon.The popular ridicule soon changed into acclaim; the new invention was exhibited in a public square and Cyrus McCormick became a local celebrity.Perhaps the words that pleased him most, however, were those spoken by his father."I am proud," said the old man, "to have a son who can do what I failed to do."This McCormick reaper dates from 1831; but it represented merely the beginnings of the modern machine.It performed only a single function; it simply cut the crop.When its sliding blade had performed this task, the grain fell back upon a platform, and a farm hand, walking alongside, raked this off upon the ground.Anumber of human harvesters followed, picked up the bundles, and tied a few strips of grain around them, making the sheaf.The work was exceedingly wearying and particularly hard upon the women who were frequently impressed into service as farm-hands.
About 1858 two farmers named Marsh, who lived near De Kalb, Illinois, solved this problem.They attached to their McCormick reaper a moving platform upon which the cut grain was deposited.
A footboard was fixed to the machine upon which two men stood.As the grain came upon this moving platform these men seized it, bound it into sheaves, and threw it upon the field.Simple as this procedure seemed it really worked a revolution in agriculture; for the first time since the pronouncement of the primal curse, the farmer abandoned his hunchback attitude and did his work standing erect.Yet this device also had its disqualifications, the chief one being that it converted the human sheaf-binder into a sweat-shop worker.It was necessary to bind the grain as rapidly as the platform brought it up; the worker was therefore kept in constant motion; and the consequences were frequently distressing and nerve racking.Yet this "Marsh Harvester" remained the great favorite with farmers from about 1860 to 1874.
