He originated a new method of advertising the self-binders among the farmers. Special flat-cars were provided for him by the railroads. Upon each one of these cars a binder was placed, in the charge of an expert. These cars, during the harvest season, were attached to ordinary freight trains; and whenever the train came to a busy wheat-field it was stopped for an hour or more, the self-binder was rushed from the car to the field, and an exhibition of its skill given to the wondering farmers. Then it was put back on its car, and the train resumed its leisurely course until it arrived at the next scene of harvesting.
The sensitive-natured inventor, Charles B. Withington, who gave such timely aid to McCormick, was one of the most romantic knights-errant of industry in his generation. Born near Akron a year before McCormick invented his Reaper, he was trained by his father to be a watchmaker. At fifteen, to earn some pocket-money, he went into the harvest field to bind grain. He was not robust, and the hard, stooping labor under a hot sun would sometimes bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage. There were times after the day's work was done when he was too weary to walk home, and would throw himself upon the stubble to rest.
At eighteen he set out to find his fortune in the far West, became a Forty-niner, drifted to Australia, and in 1855 came back to Janesville, Wisconsin, with three thousand dollars or more in his belt. All this money he proceeded to fritter away on the invention of a self-rake Reaper—"a crazy scheme," as the townspeople called it. As it happened, the whole southern region of Wisconsin was being stirred up at that time by the speeches of an inventive Madison editor, who went by the name of "Pump" Carpenter. Carpenter's hobby was that the binding of grain must be done by machinery. He was eloquent and popular, and his arguments were substantiated by a little model which he was accustomed to carry about with him. Withington heard him speak and was converted. He dropped his self-rake reaper and went to work upon a self-binder. He completed his first machine in 1872, and was thrust from one discouragement to another until two years later he met McCormick.
It is a most interesting fact, and certainly not an accidental one, that the group of noted inventors who together produced the self-binder all appeared from the region south of Madison, which had been so aroused by the eloquence of "Pump" Carpenter. Besides C. B. Withington, there were Sylvanus D. Locke, also of Janesville, H. A. Holmes, of Beloit, John F. Appleby, of Mazomanie, W. W. Burson, Jacob Behel, George H. Spaulding, and Marquis L. Gorham, of Rockford.
Until 1880, all went well with McCormick and the Withington self-binder. Apparently, the process of invention had ceased. The Reaper had become of age. This miraculous wire-twisting machine was working everywhere with clock-like precision, and was believed to be the best that human ingenuity could devise. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky, came the news that William Deering had made and sold 3,000 twine self-binders, and that the farmers had all at once become prejudiced against the use of wire. Wire, they said, got mixed with the straw and killed their cattle. Wire fell in the wheat and made trouble in the flour-mills. Wire cut their hands. Wire cluttered up their barn-yards. They would have no more to do with wire. What they wanted and must have was twine.
William Deering, the newcomer who had caused this disturbance, became in a flash McCormick's ablest competitor. He had entered the business eight years before with a running start, having been a successful dry goods merchant in Maine. His geneology in the harvester industry shows that he had become an active partner of E. H. Gammon in 1872. Gammon, who had formerly been a Methodist preacher in Maine, had started as an agent for Seymour and Morgan of Brockport, which firm had been licensed by McCormick in 1845. Deering was the first highly skilled business man to enter the harvester trade. He was not a farmer's son, like McCormick. He was city-bred and factory trained. And in 1880 he staked practically his whole fortune upon the making of 3,000 twine self-binders, and won.
Cyrus McCormick saw at a glance that the wire self-binder must go. It was his policy to give the farmers what they wanted, rather than to force upon them an unpopular machine. So he called to his aid a mechanical genius named Marquis L. Gorham—one of those who had been lured into the quest of a self-binder by the insistence of "Pump" Carpenter. Gorham's most valuable contribution was a self-sizing device, by which all bound sheaves were made to be the same size. By the time that the grain stood ripe and yellow the following season, Gorham had prepared a twine self-binder that worked well, and McCormick, yielding to this sudden hostility against wire, pushed the Gorham machine with the full force of his great organization.
This evolution of the Reaper into the twine self-binder was a momentous event. It tremendously increased the sales. There were 60,000 machines of all kinds sold in 1880, and 250,000 in 1885. And it strikingly decreased the number of manufacturers. There were a hundred or more until the appearance of the twine binder: and all but twenty-two fell out of the race. Some of these were driven out by the expensive war of patents that now ensued. But most of them gave up the contest for lack of capital. The era of big production had arrived, and the little hand-labor shops could not produce an intricate self-binder for the low price at which they were being sold.
Even McCormick lost heavily at first, before a truce was called in this battle of the binders. One lawsuit cost him more than $225,000 and one experiment, with what was called a "low-down" binder, cost him $80,000. He was as determined as ever not to be beaten; and although he was at this time over seventy years of age, and sorely crippled by rheumatism, he straightway entered into a trade war with Deering, which was not ended until 1902. Many of the older workmen who are now employed in the McCormick works can remember the stress and strain of those battling years, and how their indomitable old leader, at times when he was unable to walk, would have himself pushed in a wheeled chair through the various buildings of his immense plant, to make sure that every part of the great mechanism was working smoothly.
Of all the competitors who had fought him in the early days, before the Civil War, there were few now remaining. Hussey, his first antagonist, had sold out to a mowing machine syndicate in 1861. Emerson, Seymour, and Morgan had decided not to make self-binders. Jerome Fassler, of Springfield, Ohio, took his fortune of two million dollars and went to New York City in 1882 with a scheme to build a subway. Manny was dead, and very few were living of those who had seen the Reaper of 1831.