Cyrus Hall McCormick.
In the course of an argument before the Commissioner of Patents, in 1859, the late Reverdy Johnson declared that the McCormick reaper was worth $55,000,000 a year to this country, an estimate that was not disputed. At about the same time the late William H. Seward said that "owing to Mr. McCormick's invention the line of civilization moves westward thirty miles each year." Already the London Times, after ridiculing the McCormick reaper exhibited at the London World's Fair of 1851, as "a cross between an Astley (circus) chariot, a wheel-barrow, and a flying-machine," confessed, when the reaper had been tested in the fields, that it was "worth to the farmers of England the whole cost of this exhibition." Writing of this glorious success, Mr. Seward said: "So the reaper of 1831, as improved in 1845, achieved for its inventor a triumph which all then felt and acknowledged was not more a personal one than it was a national one. It was justly so regarded. No general or consul, drawn in a chariot through the streets of Rome by order of the Senate, ever conferred upon mankind benefits so great as he who thus vindicated the genius of our country at the World's Exhibition of Art in the metropolis of the British empire in 1851." In 1861, though declining to extend the patent for the reaper, the Commissioner of Patents, D.P. Holloway, paid the inventor this remarkable tribute: "Cyrus H. McCormick is an inventor whose fame, while he is yet living, has spread through the world. His genius has done honor to his own country, and has been the admiration of foreign nations, and he will live in the grateful recollection of mankind as long as the reaping-machine is employed in gathering the harvest." Nevertheless the extension of the patent of 1834, which act of justice would have given the inventor an opportunity to obtain an adequate reward for his work, was refused upon the extraordinary ground that "the reaper was of too great value to the public to be controlled by any individual." In other words, the benefit conferred by McCormick upon the country was too great to be paid for; therefore no effort should be made to pay for it. Finally, the French Academy of Sciences, when McCormick was elected to the Institute of France—an honor paid but to few Americans—mentioned the election as due to "his having done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."
Farm where Cyrus H. McCormick was Born and Raised.
It is thus evident that the tremendous service done to the civilized world by the invention of the McCormick reaper was appreciated years ago. Yet it is improbable that the whole value of the invention was fully realized. To-day the McCormick works at Chicago turn out yearly, and have turned out for several years, more than one hundred thousand reapers and mowers. At a moderate estimate every McCormick reaper, and every reaper founded upon it and containing its essential features, saves the labor of six men during the ten harvest days of the year. The present number of reapers in operation to-day, all of them based upon the McCormick patents, is estimated at about two million, so that, counting a man's labor at $1 a day, here is a yearly saving of more than $100,000,000. The reaper thus stands beside the steam-engine and the sewing-machine as one of the most important labor-saving inventions of our time, relieving millions of men from the most arduous drudgery and increasing the world's wealth by hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It is some satisfaction to know that the inventor of the reaper lived to enjoy the fruits of his work. A remarkable man in every respect, his ingenuity, perseverance, courage under injustice, and generosity finally won him not only the material rewards that were his by right, but the esteem and honor of the civilized world.
Like Fulton and Morse, Cyrus Hall McCormick came of Scotch-Irish blood, a race marked by fixed purpose, untiring industry in carrying out that purpose, a strong sense of moral obligation, and an unswerving determination to do right by the light of conscience though the heavens fall. He was born on the 15th of February, 1809, at Walnut Grove, in Rockbridge County, Va., and was the eldest of eight children, six of whom lived to grow up. His father, Robert McCormick, in addition to farming, had workshops of considerable importance on his farm, as well as a saw-mill and grist-mill and smelting furnaces. In these workshops young Cyrus McCormick probably got his first love for mechanical devices. Robert McCormick was an inventor of no mean attainment. He devised and built a thresher, a hemp-breaker, some mill improvements, and in 1816 he made and tried a mechanical reaper. In those days so much of the farmer's hard labor was expended in swinging the scythe that it seems strange we have no record of more attempts to make a machine do the work. A schoolmaster named Ogle is said to have built a reaper in 1822, but, according to his own admission, it would not work. Bell, a Scotch minister, also contrived a reaping-machine that was tried in 1828. In the course of the subsequent patent litigation over the reaper the claims of these early inventors were made the most of by McCormick's opponents, but the courts of last resort invariably settled the question in McCormick's favor.
As a farmer boy, young Cyrus McCormick began his day's work in the fields at five o'clock. In winter he went to the Old Field School. During his boyhood he would watch his father's experiments and disappointments. His first attempt in the same direction was the construction, at the age of fifteen, of a harvesting-cradle by which he was enabled to keep up with an able-bodied workman. His first patented invention (1831) was a plough which threw alternate furrows on either side, being thus either a right-hand or left-hand plough. This was superseded in 1833 by an improved plough, also by McCormick, called the self-sharpening plough, which did excellent work. His father having worked long and unsuccessfully at a mechanical reaper, it was natural that young McCormick's mind should turn over the same problem from time to time, and his father's failures did not deter him, although Robert McCormick had suffered so much in mind and pocket through the impracticability of his reaper that he warned his son against wasting more time and money upon the dream. One martyr to mechanical progress was enough for the McCormick family. But the possibility of making a machine do the hard, hot work of the harvest-field had a fascination for the young man, and the more he studied the discarded reaping-machine made by his father in 1816, the more firmly he became convinced that while the principle of that device was wrong, the work could be done. In those days the development of the country really depended upon some better, cheaper way of harvesting. The land was fertile, and there was practically no end of it. But labor was scarce.