Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

Wheat is not a wild weed. It is a tame and transient plant—a plant of civilization. It could not continue to exist without man, and man, perhaps, could not exist except in the tropical countries without wheat. Each needs the other. If the human race were to perish from the face of the earth, wheat might survive for three years, but no longer. So close has this co-operation been between wheat and civilized man, that an eminent German writer, Dr. Gerland, maintains with a wealth of evidence that wheat was the original cause of civilization, partly because it was the first good and plentiful food, and partly because it was wheat that persuaded primitive man to forsake his wars and his wanderings and to learn the peaceful habits of agriculture.

In any case, whatever its earlier history may have been, wheat is to-day the chief food of the civilized races of mankind. It is the main support of 600,000,000 people. It has overcome its natural enemies—weeds, fungus diseases, insects, and drought,—and attained a crop total of 3,500,000,000 bushels a year. To the intelligent, purposeful nations that have become the masters of the human race, wheat is now the staff of life, the milk of Mother Earth, the essence of soil and air and rain and sunshine.

But, although wheat was known to be the best food for fifty centuries, it did not until very recently, until thirty or forty years ago, become a world-food. Every community ate up its own wheat. It had little or none to sell, because, no matter how much grain the farmers planted, they could not in the eight or ten days of harvest gather more than a certain limited quantity into their barns. All that one man could do, with his wife to help him, was to snatch in enough wheat to feed ten people for a year. Each family could do no more than feed one other family and itself. This was the Tragedy of the Wheat. There was never enough of it. It was so precious that none could be sure of it except the kings and the nobilities. As for the masses of peasantry who sowed the wheat and reaped it with hand-sickles, they would almost as soon have thought of wearing diamonds as of eating white bread.

Then, in 1831, came the Reaper. It was not invented in any of the older countries, nor in any of the great cities of the world. For five thousand years neither the peasants nor the kings had conceived of any better way of reaping wheat than with the sickle and the scythe. The man who had cut the Gordian knot of Famine was the son of a citizen-farmer, Cyrus Hall McCormick by name, Scotch-Irish by race, American by birth, and inventor by heredity and early training.

This new machine, the Reaper, when it was full-grown into the self-binder, was equal to forty sickles. With one man to drive it, it could cut and bind enough wheat in one season to feed four hundred people. In its most highly developed form, the combined harvester and thresher, it has become so gigantic a machine that thirty-two horses are required to haul it. This leviathan cuts a fifty-foot roadway through the grain, threshes it and bags it at the rate of one bag every half-minute. And the total world production of Reapers of every sort—self-binders, mowers, headers, corn-binders, etc.,—is probably as many as 1,500,000 a year, two-thirds of them being made in the United States.

Because of this harvesting machinery, the wheat crop of the world is now nearly twice what it was in 1879. The American crop has multiplied six and a half times in fifty years. Western Canada, Australia, Siberia, and Argentina have become wheat producers. The cost of growing one bushel in America, with machinery and high wages, is now about half a dollar, which is less than the cost in Europe and as low as the cost in India, where laborers can be hired for a few pennies a day. With a sickle, the time-cost of a bushel of wheat was three hours; with a self-binder, it is now ten minutes. And so, because of these amazing results, the rattle of the harvester has become an indispensable part of the music of our industrial orchestra, harmonious with the click of the telegraph key, the ring of the telephone bell, the hum of the sewing-machine, the roar of the Bessemer converter, the gong of the trolley, the whistle of the steamboat, and the puff of the locomotive.

Next to the Reaper, the most important factors in this world-mechanism of the bread, are the Railroad and the Steamboat. These arrived on the scene just at the right time to distribute the surplus that the Reaper produced. The Steamboat, and its humble relative, the barge, came first. The Erie Canal of 1825, the Suez Canal of 1869, and the Sault Ste. Marie Canal of 1881, were built largely for the carrying of the wheat. By 1856 wheat was on its way from Chicago to Europe; and four years later the first wheat-ship curved around Cape Horn from California. Ten years ago an entirely new kind of ship, a sort of immense steel bag called a "whaleback," was built to carry 250,000 bushels of wheat in a single load. By this means a ton of wheat is actually carried thirteen miles for one cent. There are to-day small barges on the canals of Holland, large ones on the river Volga, and several thousand steamships on the world's main water-ways, all carrying burdens of wheat. Enough is now being transported from port to port to give steady work to fully three hundred steamships and summer work to very nearly as many more.

There was an exciting contest between the ship and the car in the earlier days of transportation, to see which should carry the largest share of the wheat. About 1869 the car won. In this year, too, the United States was belted with a railway, east to west, which meant the opening up of the first great wheat-empire. Other railways pushed out into the vast prairies of the West, lured by the call of the wheat. They were the pioneers of the world's wheat-railways. Wheat was their chief freight and wheat farmers were their chief passengers. At the outset the grain was shipped in bags. Then some railway genius invented the grain-car, which holds as much as twenty or twenty-five wagons. And to-day one of the ordinary moving pictures of an American railroad is a sixty-car train travelling eastward with enough wheat in its rolling bins to give bread to a city of ten thousand people for a year.

The trans-Siberian railway, which is the longest straight line of steel in the world, was built largely as a wheat-conveyor. So were the railways of western Canada, Argentina, and India. Ever since the advent of the Reaper wheat has been the prolific mother of railways and steamships. While the rice nations are still putting their burdens on ox-carts and on the backs of camels and elephants, the wheat nations have built up a system of transportation that is a daily miracle of cheapness, efficiency, and speed. This system is not yet finished. A new line of steamships is about to be set afloat between Buenos Ayres and Hamburg. The Erie Canal is being re-made, at a fabulous cost, so that a steamer with 100,000 bushels of wheat can go directly from Buffalo to New York. And an adventurous railway is now pushing its way north from the wheat-fields of western Canada to the unknown water of Hudson Bay, whence the wheat will be carried by boat to London and Liverpool.

To-day it is not the long haul of wheat, but the short haul, that is more expensive. It is cheaper to carry wheat from one country to another than from the barn to the nearest town. The average distance that an American farmer has to haul his grain is nine and a half miles, and the average cost of haulage is nine cents per hundred pounds. Thus it has actually become true that to carry wheat ten miles by wagon costs more than 2,300 miles by steamship. Such is the tense efficiency of our wheat-carrier system that a bushel of grain can now be picked up in Missouri and sent to the cotton-spinners of England for a dime.