Historic Inventions

by Rupert Sargent Holland

Yet even though the machine could divide the grain properly, and the knife cut with a double motion, there was the possibility that the blade might simply press the grain down and so slide over it. This was especially apt to be the case after a rain, or when the grain had been badly blown about by the wind. The problem now was how to hold it upright. He found the solution lay in adding a row of indentations that projected a few inches from the edge of the knife, and acted like fingers in catching the stalks and holding them in place to be cut.

These three ideas, the divider, the reciprocating blade, and the fingers, were all fundamental devices of the machine Cyrus McCormick was building. They all met the question of how the grain could be cut. To these he next added a revolving reel, that would lift any grain that had fallen and straighten it, and a platform to catch the grain as it was cut and fell. His idea was that a man should walk along beside the reaper and rake off the grain as it fell upon the platform.

Two more devices, and his first machine was completed. One was to have the shafts placed on the outside of the reaper, or so that the horse would pull it sideways, instead of having to push it, as had been the case with his father’s model. The other was to have the whole machine practically operated by one big wheel, which should bear the weight and move the knife and the reel.

It had taken young McCormick many months to work out all these problems, and there were only one or two weeks each year, the harvest weeks, when he could actually try his machine. He wanted to use it in the spring of 1831, but he found that the work of finishing all the necessary details was enormous. He begged his father to leave a small patch of wheat for him to try to cut, and at last, one day in July of that year, he drove his cumbersome machine into the field. All his family watched as the reaper headed toward the grain. They saw the wheat gathered and swept down upon the knife, they saw the blade move back and forth and cut the grain, and then saw it fall upon the little platform. The machine worked with hitches, not nearly so smoothly nor so efficiently as it should, but it did work; it gathered the grain in and it left it in good shape to be raked off the platform. The trial proved that such a machine could be made to do the work, and that was all that the inventor wanted.

He drove it back to his workshop and made certain changes in the reel and the divider. Then, several days later, he drove it over to the little settlement at Steele’s Tavern, and cut six acres of oats in one afternoon. That was a marvelous feat, and caused great wonder in the countryside, but the harvesting season had ended, and the inventor would have to wait a year before he could prove the use of his machine again.

By the next year McCormick was ready for a larger audience. The town of Lexington lay some eighteen miles south of his home, and he made arrangements with a farmer there, named John Ruff, to give an exhibition of his reaper in the latter’s field. Over a hundred people were present when McCormick arrived, all curious to see what could be done with the complicated-looking machine. Many of them were harvesters themselves, and none too eager to see a mechanical device enter into competition for their work. The field was hilly and rough, and the reaper careened about in it like a ship in a gale. The farmer grew indignant, and protested that McCormick would ruin all his wheat, and the laborers began to jeer and joke at the machine’s expense. The exhibition gave every sign of proving a failure when one of the spectators called out that he owned the next field and would be glad to give McCormick a chance there. This field was level, and the young man quickly turned his reaper into it. Before sunset he had cut six acres of wheat, and convinced his audience that his machine was a great improvement over the old method. That evening he drove the reaper to the court-house square and explained its working to the towns people. Very few of them saw how it was to revolutionize the farmer’s labor, but one or two did. Professor Bradshaw, of the local academy, studied the machine, and then stated publicly that in his opinion, “This machine is worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

The Earliest Reaper

But if Cyrus McCormick had been fortunate in growing up on a farm where he could study the problem of cutting grain at first hand he was now to find that he was not so fortunate when it came to building other reapers and marketing them. His home was four days’ travel from Richmond. He must have money to get the iron for his machines, to advertise, and to pay agents to try to sell them. He had very little money. He did advertise in the Lexington Union in September, 1833, offering reapers for sale at fifty dollars; but there were no answers to his advertisements. So skeptical were the farmers that it was seven years before one bought a reaper of him. But he had faith enough in his invention to take out a patent on it in 1834.

Until now McCormick had depended on the farm for his livelihood, but there was little profit in this, and he turned his attention to a deposit of iron ore in the neighborhood, and built a furnace and began to make iron. This succeeded until the panic of 1837 reached the Virginia country and brought debt and lowered prices with it. Cyrus surrendered his farm and what other property he had to his creditors. None of them was sufficiently interested in the crude reaper to consider it worth taking.