[CHAPTER VII]
THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER
OF all the varieties of difficulties that confronted Cyrus H. McCormick during his strenuous life, the most baffling and disconcerting difficulty was when his Reaper began to grow. For fifteen years—from 1845 to 1860—it had remained unchanged except that seats had been added for the raker and the driver. It did no more than cut the grain and leave it on the ground in loose bundles. It had abolished the sickler and the cradler; but there yet remained the raker and the binder. Might it not be possible, thought the restless American brain, to abolish these also and leave no one but the driver?
This at once became a most popular and fascinating problem for inventors. There was by this time everything to gain and nothing to lose by improving the Reaper. There was no opposition and no ridicule. To cut grain by horse-power had become, of course, the only proper way of cutting it. As many as 20,000 Reapers of all kinds were made in 1860; and McCormick's factory had grown to be the pride of Chicago. It was 90 by 150 feet in size, two stories high, and gave work to about a hundred and twenty men.
As early as 1852 a fantastic self-rake Reaper had been invented by a mechanical genius named Jearum Atkins. This man was a bed-ridden cripple, who, to while away the tiresome hours of his confinement, bought a McCormick Reaper, had it placed outside his window, and actually devised an attachment to it which automatically raked off the cut grain in bundles. It was a grotesque contrivance. The farmers nicknamed it the "Iron Man." It consisted of an upright post, with two revolving iron arms. These arms whirled stiffly around, windmill fashion, and scraped the grain from the platform to the ground.
An amusing anecdote of this machine was told by Henry Wallace, known to all farmers of the Middle West as the founder of Wallace's Farmer. "The first Reaper that my father bought," said Mr. Wallace, "was a McCormick machine that had an 'Iron Man' on it. The first day that it was driven into the grain it made such a clatter that the horses ran away. It was certainly a terrifying sight as it rattled through the wheat, with its long, rake-fingered arms flying and hurling the cut grain in the wildest disorder. It was as good as a chariot race in a circus to the crowd of farmers, who had come to see how the new machine would operate. The next day my father tried again. There had been rain during the night, and the heavy machine stuck fast in the mud. It had cost $300, but my father took the 'Iron Man' off, and during the remainder of that harvest we raked off the grain by hand."
A great variety of self-rake Reapers soon appeared, and after 1860 the farmers would buy no other kind. Thus a part of the problem had been solved. The raker was abolished. There now remained the much more difficult work of supplanting the binder—the man, or sometimes woman, who gathered up the bundles of cut grain, and, making a crude rope of the grain itself, bound it tightly around the middle, making what was called a sheaf. This was hard, back-breaking work, intolerable when the sun was hot, except to men of the strongest physique. It required not strength only, but skill. Ninety-nine farmers out of a hundred believed that it would always have to be done by hand. "How can it be possible," they asked, "that a machine which is being dragged by horses over a rough field can at the same time be picking up grain and tying knots?"
Just then two young farmers near De Kalb came to the rescue by inventing a new species of machine. It was neither a Reaper nor a self-binder. It was half-way between the two. It was the missing link. It appeared that an inventor named Mann had taken a McCormick Reaper and built a moving platform upon it, in such a way that the grain was carried up to a wagon which was drawn alongside. These two young farmers had bought a Mann machine, and one of them, when he saw it in operation, originated a brilliant idea.
"Why should the grain be carried up to a wagon?" he asked. "Why can't we put a foot-board on the machine, for two of us to stand on, and then bind the grain as fast as it is carried up?"
This was the origin of the "Marsh Harvester," which held the field for ten years or longer. It did not abolish the man who bound, but it gave him a chance to work twice as fast. It compelled him to be quick. It saved him the trouble of walking from bundle to bundle. It enabled him to stand erect. And best of all, it put half a dozen inventors on the right line of thought. Plainly, what was needed now was to teach a Marsh Harvester to tie knots.