Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

He had such a problem to solve as no inventor of to-day or to-morrow can have. He was not living, as we are, in an age of faith and optimism—when every new invention is welcomed with a shout of joy. He confronted a sceptical and slow-moving little world, so different from that of to-day that it requires a few lines of portrayal.

In general, it was a non-inventive and hand-labor world. There were few factories, except for the weaving of cotton and woollen cloth. There was no sewing-machine, nor Bessemer converter, nor Hoe press, nor telegraph, nor photography. It was still the age of the tallow candle and stage-coach and tinder-box. Practically no such thing was known as farm machinery. Jethro Wood had invented his iron plow, but he was at this time dying in poverty, never having been able to persuade farmers to abandon their plows of wood. As for steel plows, no one in any country had conceived of such a thing. James Oliver was a bare-footed school-boy in Scotland and John Deere was a young blacksmith in Vermont. Plows were pulled by oxen and horses, not by slaves, as in certain regions of Asia; but almost every other sort of farm work was done by hand.

Railways were few and of little account. Eighty-two miles of flimsy track had been built in the United States; the Baltimore and Ohio was making a solemn experiment with locomotives, horses, and sails, to ascertain which one of these three was the best method of propulsion. The first really successful American locomotive was put on the rails in this year; and Professor Joseph Henry set up his trial telegraph wire and gave the electric current its first lesson in obedience.

There was no free library in the world in 1831. The first one was started in Peterborough, N. H., two years later. In England, electoral reform had not begun, a General Fast had been ordered because of the prevalence of cholera, and a four-pound loaf cost more than the day's pay of a laborer. The United States was a twenty-four-State republic, with very little knowledge of two-thirds of its own territory. The source of the Mississippi River, for instance, was unknown. To send a letter from Boston to New York cost the price of half a bushel of wheat. There was no newspaper in Wisconsin and no house in Iowa. The first sale of lots was announced in Chicago, but there was then no public building in that hamlet, nothing but a few log cabins in a swampy waste that was populous only in wild ducks, bears, and wolves. Forty of the latter were shot by the villagers in 1834.

REAPING WITH CRUDE KNIVES IN INDIA

Of the many eminent men who had the same birth-year as McCormick, Poe and Mendelssohn had begun to be known as men of genius in 1831. But Lincoln was then "a sort of clerk" in a village store. Darwin was setting out on H. M. S. Beagle upon his first voyage as a naturalist. Gladstone was a student at Oxford. Proudhon was working at the case as a poor printer. Oliver Wendell Holmes was somewhat aimlessly studying law. Chopin was on his way to Paris. Tennyson had left college, without a degree, to devote his life to the service of poetry. Three great men who had been born earlier, Garrison, Whittier, and Mazzini, began their life-work in 1831. And science was a babe in the cradle. Herbert Spencer, Virchow and Pasteur were learning the multiplication table. Huxley was six and Bertheiot four.

There was no Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, California, nor Texas. Virginia was the main wheat State. Local famines were of yearly occurrence. The period between 1816 and 1820 had been one of severe depression and was bitterly referred to as the "1800-and-starve-to-death" period. Seventy-five thousand people had been imprisoned for debt in New York in a single year, and a workingmen's party had sprung up as a protest against such intolerable conditions. Even as late as 1837 there was a bread riot in the city of New York. Five thousand hungry rioters broke into the warehouse of Eli Hart & Company, and destroyed a great quantity of flour and wheat. Five hundred barrels of flour were thrown from the windows; and women and children gathered it up greedily from the dirty gutter where it fell.

So the world that confronted Cyrus McCormick was not a friendly world of science and invention and prosperity. It was slow and dull and largely hostile to whoever would teach it a better way of working. And we shall now see by what means McCormick compelled it to accept his Reaper, and to give him the credit and pay for his invention.

He was resolved from the first not to be robbed and flung aside as most inventors had been. Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, had said in 1812: "The whole amount I have received is not equal to the value of the labor saved in one hour by my machines now in use." Fulton had died at fifty, plagued and plundered by imitators. Kay, Jacquard, Heathcoat, and Hargreaves, inventors of weaving machinery, were mobbed. Arkwright's mill was burned by incendiaries. Gutenberg, Cort, and Jethro Wood lost their fortunes. Palissy was thrown into the Bastile. And Goodyear, who gave us rubber, Bottgher, who gave us Sèvres porcelain, and Sauvage, who gave us the screw propeller, died in poverty and neglect.