Suppose that bread were money, just for one day! What a lesson it would be on the social value of the reaper! Thirty loaves would be the day’s pay of a labourer—as much as he could carry on his back. Two loaves for a cigar—three for a shave—five for a bunch of violets—forty for a theatre ticket—a hundred for a bottle of champagne! Is there anything cheaper than bread?
The reaper was America’s answer to Malthus—who scared England into abolishing the Corn Laws by his proclamation that “the ultimate check to population is the lack of food.” What would that well-meaning pessimist think were he now alive, if he were told that the human race is growing wheat at the rate of ten bushels a year per family? Or that Minnesota and the Dakotas (names that the world of his day had never heard) produce enough wheat to feed all the people of England?
The reaper was America’s answer to the world’s demand for democracy. Instead of bread riots and red flags and theories of an earthly paradise in which nobody worked but the Government, the United States invented a machine that gave democracy a chance. Instead of a guillotine to cut off the heads of the privileged people who ate too much, it produced a reaper that gave everybody enough. This was not a complete answer, nor will there ever be one, to the riddle of liberty, equality and fraternity. But it was so much better than theories and riots that it helped to persuade twenty-five million immigrants to cross the ocean and become shareholders in the American Republic.
If it were possible to trace back a strand in the twisted thread of cause and effect, we would find that many a factory and steel-mill owes its origin to the flood of wheat-money that came to us from Europe in 1880 and 1881—every dollar of it made by the humble harvester.
Without this obedient slave of wood and steel, all our railroads and skyscrapers and automobiles could not save us from famine. If we had to reap our grain in the same way as the Romans did, it would take half the men in the United States to feed us on bread alone, to say nothing of the rest of the menu.
Like most great things, the reaper was born among humble people and in a humble way. It was crude at first and dogged by failure. No one man made it. It was the product of a hundred brains.
The exact truth about its origin is not known and never will be. What few facts there were have been torn and twisted by the bitter feuds of the Patent Office. Every letter and document that exists is controversial. So I cannot say that the story, as I give it, is entirely true, but only that it is as near as I can get to the truth after six months of investigation.
There is evidence to show that Cyrus Hall McCormick completed a practical reaper in 1831, although the first reaper patent was taken out in 1833 by an inventive seaman named Obed Hussey, of Baltimore. The young McCormick did not secure his patent until 1834; but he had given a public exhibition in Virginia three years before.
There were nearly a hundred people who saw this exhibition. Not one of them is now alive; and the story as told by their children has many little touches of imagination. But in the main, it is very likely to be true.
It was in the fall of 1831 when Cyrus McCormick hitched four horses to his unwieldy machine and clattered out of the barnyard into a field of wheat nearby. Horses shied and pranced at the absurd object, which was unlike anything else on the face of the earth. Dogs barked. Small boys yelled. Farmers, whose backs were bent and whose fingers were scarred from the harvest labour, gazed with contemptuous curiosity at the queer contraption which was expected to cut grain without hands.