Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

As usually happens in the case of inventions, it came where it was not expected. It made its arrival in the Hungarian city of Budapest in 1874. The "new process," as it was called, was based upon the use of steel rolls instead of stones. It was as superior to the old-fashioned way as the Reaper had been to the sickle or as the thresher was to the flail. It was amazingly quick and produced a better flour. By reason of these new mills, Budapest became at a bound the foremost "Flour City" of the world, and held its place against all comers until 1890.

Then the prestige passed to Minneapolis—a young city on the head-waters of the Mississippi, the recent home of the prairie-dog and the buffalo. Shortly before the Civil War, a youthful lawyer named William D. Washburn drifted westwards from Maine until he came to Minneapolis, at that time a tiny village on the frontier. He found no clients here, and no law; but he did find a ledge of limestone rock jutting across the Mississippi and making the only large water-fall in all that region. So he threw aside his legal education and became the organizer of a water-power company and the owner of a little flour-mill. Soon the long line of Reapers reached Minneapolis and swept on westwards into the richest wheat lands that had ever been known. The wheat overwhelmed the slow old-fashioned mills, so the ex-lawyer in 1878 adopted the Budapest system and built a roller-mill that was the quickest and most automatic of its kind. Other millers had by this time come to Minneapolis—Pillsbury, Crosby, Christian, and Dunwoody; and all together they pushed the flour business until in twelve years they had become the main millers of the world.

INDIANS REAPING THEIR HARVEST, WHITE EARTH, MINNESOTA

To-day the river of wheat is deepest at Minneapolis. Its twenty-two great mills roll 120,000,000 bushels into flour as an ordinary year's work. While the swiftest mill in Athens, in the age of Pericles, produced no more than two barrels a day, there is one mill of incredible size in Minneapolis that fills seventeen thousand barrels in a twenty-four hours' run—enough to give bread to New York State and California. What the Greeks did in a day the Minnesotans do in ten seconds. Five million barrels of this Minneapolis flour is each year scattered among foreign nations, a fact which informs us that flour is now not a local product, but part of the real currency of nations. No doubt the people who dwell by the Sea of Galilee, whose fathers were once miraculously fed upon seven loaves of bread and a few fishes, are now being fed miraculously upon loaves of bread made from the flour of Minneapolis.

The making of the bread—that is the final step in this movement of the wheat. As yet, this is a local process, though not wholly so. Certain ready-to-eat foods are now being made from wheat and boxed in such a way that they may be sent from one country to another. If we trace back the original of a loaf of bread of ordinary size, we shall find that it was made from two-thirds of a pound of flour, which was rolled from one pound of wheat, containing about twelve thousand grains that were grown on forty-eight square feet of land and reaped by a self-binder in two seconds. When the wheat was cut in the old-fashioned way, with a hand-sickle, every loaf of bread required eighty seconds' labor instead of two.

In a public test made last year in the State of Washington, wheat was cut, threshed, ground into flour, and baked into biscuits in twenty-three minutes. This is an evidence that all the machinery for handling grain has now been brought up to the same high level of speed and efficiency as the self-binder. It also helps us to understand the daily marvel of cheap bread—the fact that a hundred loaves of bread are now delivered one by one at an American workingman's door for the cost of a seat at the opera or a couple of song-records by Caruso.

So plentiful is this bread that the loaves baked from American flour in 1907 would have made a wall of bread around the earth, or have given thirty loaves apiece to every human creature; and so cheap has it become in these latter days that even in the United States it is not more than three cents a day per capita. The unskilled laborer who receives $1.50 a day, earns his bread in the first ten minutes, every work day morning. And the total tax he pays to the men who make the self-binders is not more than one tenth of a cent per loaf.

Three-sevenths of the people of the world are now on a wheat basis. They are the lesser fraction in point of numbers, but the larger in point of prosperity and progress. A wheat map of the globe would be very nearly a map of modern civilization. As yet, there are many peasants who grow wheat and cannot afford to eat it. But the number of bread-eaters is steadily increasing, probably at the rate of four or five million a year.

The nation that eats most bread per capita is Belgium. After her come France, England, and the United States. As the Belgians, with their scanty acres, cannot grow more wheat than would support them for nine weeks, they are compelled to import nearly fifty million bushels a year; and it is this continual influx of grain that has done most to make Antwerp the third busiest port in the world and the home of forty steamship lines.