INVENTION OF THE REAPER
Most interesting of all are the reapers because they represent the first successful efforts to introduce machinery into farming operations. Toward the close of the eighteenth century the Royal Agricultural Society of England offered a prize for the invention of a successful reaper, which stimulated inventive effort in this field. But although many patents on reaping machines were granted by the British patent office, nothing was produced that completely met the requirements. In fact even as late as 1851 when a World’s Fair was held in London the British had no really successful reaper to exhibit. In the meantime, American inventors had been at work and two inventors in particular, Obed Hussey of Maryland and Cyrus McCormick of Virginia, had developed machines which had so far proved their worth that they were extensively used on American farms. These two inventors, working independently, produced machines that were very similar in basic principles. As our patent regulations of that period did not call for an extensive search of the prior art there was no official investigation to show which was entitled to the honor of priority of basic principles or whether both did not include in their applications much that was old. Hussey filed his patent on the last day of 1833 and McCormick in June of 1834.
The main stumblingblocks of earlier inventors of reaping and mowing machines was in finding a suitable method of cutting the grain. Revolving combs for tearing off the heads of grain, fingers for gathering the grain and holding it against a revolving cutter, horizontally reciprocating knives—all these methods were tried without success. Nearly three years before Hussey obtained his patent, Manning, of Plainfield, New Jersey, solved the problem by inventing a reciprocating cutter with spear-shaped blades cooperating with a finger bar that guided and held the grain against the blades. This invention was apparently unknown to either Hussey or McCormick and their patents show cutting means that were broadly the same as that of Manning.