John P. Adriance, of Poughkeepsie, had survived. He was a gentle-natured man, who was content with a small and safe percentage of the business. Byron E. Huntley, of Batavia, had also built up a small, but solidly based, enterprise. He had been the office-boy, in 1845, in the factory where the first hundred McCormick Reapers were made; and he had been a manufacturer on his own account since 1850. He, too, was a quiet, dignified man, very highly esteemed in both the United States and Europe. Lewis Miller, who deserves most credit as the creator of the mower, continued to do business at Akron. Mr. Miller was almost equally famous as a Methodist and the originator of the Chautauqua idea. At Auburn, N. Y., David M. Osborne was fighting manfully to keep in the race. He had built seven Reapers as early as 1856; and had made many friends by his ability and uprightness. At Hoosick Falls, N. Y., there was Walter A. Wood—a most competent and enterprising man; at Plano, Illinois, there was William H. Jones—self-made and as honest as the soil; and at Springfield, Ohio, were the picturesque William N. Whiteley and the powerful company of Warder, Bushnell, and Glessner. Whiteley was an inventor who had changed a McCormick Reaper into what he called a "combined machine"—a combined Reaper and mower. And Warder, Bushnell, and Glessner had begun to make McCormick Reapers, by means of a license from Seymour and Morgan, in 1852.
CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1858
Such were the most notable men who, together with McCormick and Deering, began in 1880 or soon afterwards to manufacture the new knot-tying device that had become necessary to the Reaper. As for Cyrus H. McCormick himself, he lived to see it the universal grain-cutter of all civilized countries. He lived to see it perfected into one of the most astonishing mechanisms known to man—an almost rational machine that cuts the grain, carries it on a canvas escalator up to steel hands that shape it into bundles, tie a cord around it as neatly as could be done by a sailor, and cut the cord; after which the bound sheaf is pushed into a basket and held until five of them have been collected, whereupon they are dropped carefully upon the ground.
Since 1884 there has been no essential change in the fashion of the self-binder. It is the same to-day as when McCormick was alive. In the span of his single life the Reaper was born and grew to its full maturity. He saw its Alpha and its Omega. Best of all, he saw not only its humble arrival, in a remote Virginia settlement, but, as we shall see, he saw it become the plaything of Emperors, the marvel of Siberian plainsmen, the liberator of the land-serf in twenty countries, and the bread-machine of one-half of the human race.
[CHAPTER VIII]
THE CONQUEST OF EUROPE
BY 1850 Cyrus H. McCormick was ready for new business. He now had a factory of his own, and the assistance of his brothers, William and Leander. He had a score of busy agents and a few thousand dollars in the bank. He had fought down the ridicule of the farm-hands. It was only six years since he had set out from his Virginian farm with $300 in his belt and the Idea of the Reaper in his brain; but in those six years he had worked mightily and succeeded. His Reapers were now clicking merrily in more than three thousand American wheat-fields. So, it was a natural thing that in the first flush of victory, he should look across the sea for "more worlds to conquer."