Historic Inventions

by Rupert Sargent Holland

But the inventor hung on to his faith in this machine, although no one appeared to buy it, and the expense he had gone to in making it had practically bankrupted him. And his faith met with its reward, for one day in 1840 a stranger rode up to the door of his workshop and offered fifty dollars for a reaper. He had seen one of the machines on exhibition, and had decided to try it. A little later two other farmers who lived on the James River appeared and gave McCormick two more orders. He had the satisfaction of knowing that in the harvest of 1840 three of his reapers were having a trying out.

The next year he was busy trying to perfect a blade that would cut wet grain. This took him weeks of experimenting, but at last he found that a serrated edge of a certain pattern would produce the effect he wanted. He added this to the new machines he was building, fixed the price of the reaper at one hundred dollars, and in 1842 sold seven machines, in 1843 twenty-nine, and in 1844 fifty. At last he had justified himself, and the log workshop had become a busy factory.

An invention of such great value to the farmer naturally advertised itself through the country districts. Men who heard of a machine that would cut one hundred and seventy-five acres of wheat in less than eight days—as happened in one case—naturally decided that it was worth investigating. And those who already owned machines saw a chance to make money by selling to their neighbors. One man paid McCormick $1,333 for the reaper agency of eight counties, another $500 for the right in five other counties, and a business man offered $2,500 for the agency in southern Virginia. Meantime orders were coming in from the distant states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, and the little home factory was being pushed to the utmost.

But it was not only difficult to obtain the necessary materials for building reapers on the remote Virginia farm, it was almost impossible to ship the machines ordered in time for the harvests. Those that went west had to be taken by wagon to Scottsville, sent down the canal to Richmond, put on shipboard for the long journey down the James River to the Atlantic and so by ocean to New Orleans, changed there to a river steamer that should take them up the Mississippi and by the Ohio River to the distributing point of Cincinnati. Many delays might happen in such a long trip, and many delays did happen, and in several cases the reapers did not reach the farmers who had ordered them until long after the harvesting season was over. McCormick saw that he must build his reapers in a more central place.

At that time labor was very scarce in the great central region of the country, and the farms were enormous. The wheat was going to waste, for there were not enough scythes and sickles to cut it. McCormick started on a trip through the middle West, and what he saw convinced him that his reaper would soon be an absolute necessity on every farm. All he needed was to find the best point for building his machines and shipping them. He studied this matter with the greatest care, and finally decided that the strategic place was the little town of Chicago, situated on one of the Great Lakes, and half-way between the prairies of the West and the commercial depots and factories of the eastern seaboard.

Chicago in 1847 was still little more than a frontier town. It had fought gamely with floods and droughts, with cholera and panics, with desperadoes and with land thieves. But men saw that it was bound to grow, for railroads would have to come to bring the wheat and others to carry it away, and that meant that some day it would be a great metropolis. McCormick, like most of the other business builders who were streaming into Chicago, only wanted credit to enable him to build and sell his goods, and he was fortunate enough to find a rich and prominent citizen named William B. Ogden, who was ready to give him credit and enter into partnership with him.

Ogden gave McCormick $25,000 for a half interest in the business of making reapers, and started at once to build a factory. At last the inventor was firmly established. He arranged to sell five hundred reapers for the harvest of 1848, and as one after another was sent out into the great wheat belts and set up and tried, the farmers who saw them decided that the reapers spelled prosperity for them. The business grew, and at the end of two years, when the partners found it wiser to dissolve their firm, McCormick was able to tell Ogden that he would pay him back the $25,000 that he had invested, and give him $25,000 more for interest and profits. Ogden accepted, and McCormick became sole owner of the business.

Cyrus McCormick was not only an inventor, but a business-builder of the rarest talent, one of the great pioneers in a field that was later to be cultivated in the United States to a remarkable degree. He knew he had a machine that would lessen labor and increase wealth wherever wheat was grown, and he felt that it was his mission to see that the reaper should do its share in the progress of the world. In that sense he was more than a mere business man; but in another sense he was a gigantic business-builder. Just as he had studied the problem of cutting wheat with the object of producing the most efficient machine possible, so he now studied the problem of selling his reapers in such a way that every farmer should own one. He believed in liberal advertising, and he had posters printed with a picture of the reaper at the top, and below it a formal guarantee warranting the machine’s performance absolutely. There was a space beneath this for the signature of the farmer who bought, and the agent who sold, and two witnesses. The price of the reaper was one hundred and twenty dollars, and the buyer paid down thirty dollars, and the balance at the end of six months, provided the reaper would cut one and a half acres an hour, and fulfil the other requirements. This guarantee, with a chance to obtain the money back if the purchase was unsatisfactory, was a new idea, and appealed to every one as a most sincere and honorable way of doing business. More than this, he sold for a fixed price, which was in many respects a new method of selling, and he printed in newspapers and farm journals letters he had received from farmers telling of their satisfaction with the reaper. In these new ways he laid the foundation of an enormous business.

The rush to the gold fields of California in 1849 and the resulting settlement of the far western country made Chicago even more central than it had been before. But, although the advertisements of the McCormick reaper were scattered everywhere, many farmers would put off buying until the harvesting season had almost come, and when it was too late to get the machines from the central factory. Therefore McCormick had agents and built warehouses in every farming district, and these agents were given a free rein in their own locality, their instructions being to see that every farmer who needed a reaper was given the easiest opportunity to get one. The price was a fixed one, but McCormick was patient with the purchasers. He gave them a chance to pay for the reapers with the proceeds of their harvests. He held that it was better that he should wait for the money than that the farmers should lack the machines that would enable them to make the most of their fields of grain. “I have never yet sued a farmer for the price of a reaper,” he stated in 1848, and he held to that policy as steadfastly as he could. As a result he soon gained the farmers’ confidence, and his name became identified with square, and even with lenient, dealing with all classes of purchasers. He lost little by it, and in the long run the wide-spread advertising of this policy of business proved an invaluable asset.

It is not to be supposed that no rival reapers were put upon the market. Many were, and to meet some of these McCormick made use of what became known as the Field Test. He would instruct his agents to issue invitations to his rivals to meet him in competition. Then the different makes of reapers would show how many acres of grain they could cut in an afternoon before an audience of the neighboring farmers. Judges were appointed to decide as to the merits of the different machines, and in most of the tests McCormick’s reaper outdistanced all its rivals. In one such meeting it is said that forty machines competed. Such shows were the best possible form of advertising, but in time they degenerated into absurd performances. Trick machines of unwieldy strength were built secretly, and reapers were driven into growths of young trees, and were fastened together and then pulled apart to prove which was the stronger. At last it was realized that the field tests were no longer fair, and McCormick gave them up.