So important an invention as the reaper was certain to have many improvements made to it. For a number of years, however, the only additions that were made to the original model were seats for the driver and raker. The machine did the work of the original man with the sickle or scythe and that of the cradler, and having cut the grain left it in loose piles on the ground. But it still had to be raked up and bound, and a number of inventors were busy trying to perfect mechanical devices that would do this work too. A man named Jearum Atkins invented a contrivance that was called the “Iron Man,” which was a post fastened to the reaper, having two iron arms that swept round and round and brushed the grain from the platform as fast as it was cut and had fallen. This plan was very clumsy, but improvements were made so rapidly that by 1860 the market was filled with various patterns of self-raking reapers.
The problem of binding the grain was more difficult. This had always been hard labor, taking a great deal of time and requiring three or four men to every reaper. The first step toward a self-binder was the addition of a foot-board at the back of the reaper, on which a man might stand and fasten the grain into sheaves as it fell. This was a little better than the old method, but only a little. It took less time, but it was still very hard and slow work.
McCormick was deep in a study of this matter when one day a man named James Withington came to him from Wisconsin, and announced that he had a machine that could automatically bind grain. McCormick had been working night and day over his own plan, and when the inventor began to explain he fell asleep. When he woke, Withington had left. McCormick at once sent one of his men to the inventor’s Wisconsin home, and, with many apologies, begged him to come back. Withington did, and showed McCormick a wonderful machine, one made of two arms of steel that would catch each bundle of grain, pass a wire about it and twist the ends of the wire, cut it loose, and throw it to the ground. Here was an invention that would more than double the usefulness of the reaper, and one that seems quite as remarkable as the reaper itself. McCormick at once contracted with Withington for this binder, and tried it on an Illinois farm the following July. It worked perfectly, cutting fifty acres of grain and binding it into sheaves. At last only one person was needed to harvest the wheat, the one who sat upon the driver’s seat and simply had to guide the horses. A small boy or girl could do all the work that it had taken a score of men to accomplish twenty years before.
Now it seemed as if the reaper was complete, and nothing could be added to increase its efficiency. McCormick had seen to it that the whirr of his machine was heard in every wheat field of the United States, and was busily extending the reign of the reaper to the great grain districts of Russia, India, and South America. Then, in the spring of 1880, William Deering built and sold 3,000 self-binding machines that used twine instead of wire to fasten the sheaves, and as the news of this novelty spread the farmers declared that the wire of the old binders had cut their hands, had torn their wheat, had proved hard to manage in the flour-mills, and that henceforth they must have twine-binders.
McCormick realized that he must give the farmers what they demanded, and he looked about for a man who could invent a new method of binding with twine. He found him in Marquis L. Gorham, who perfected a new twine-binder, and added a device by which all the sheaves bound were turned out in uniform size. By the next year McCormick was pushing his Gorham binder on the market, and the farmers who had wavered in their allegience to his reaper were returning to the McCormick fold.
The battle of rival reapers had been long and costly. From the building of his factory in Chicago McCormick had been engaged in continuous lawsuits with competitors. His original patent had expired in 1848, and he had used every effort to have it extended. The battle was fought through the lower courts, through the Supreme Court, and in Congress. The greatest lawyers of the time were retained on one side of the reaper struggle or the other. His rivals combined and raised a great fund to defeat his claims. He spent a fortune, but his patents were not renewed, and competition was thrown wide open. With the invention of the twine-binder the patent war burst out afresh, and again the courts were called upon for decisions between the rivals. But by now the competition had become so keen and the cost of manufacturing so heavy that the field dwindled quickly. When the war over the twine-binder ended there were only twenty-two competing firms left; before that there had been over a hundred.
The reaper had been primarily necessary in America, because here farm labor was very scarce, and the wheat fields enormously productive. In fact the growth of the newly opened Western country must have been indefinitely retarded if men had had to cut the grain by hand and harvest it in the primitive manner. The reaper was a very vital factor in the development of that country, and McCormick deserved the credit of being one of the greatest profit-builders of the land.
In Europe and Asia labor was plentiful, and the reaper had to win its way more slowly. McCormick showed his machine at the great international exhibitions and gradually induced the large landowners to consider it. Practical demonstration proved its value, and it made its appearance in the fields of European Russia and Siberia, in Germany and France and the Slavic countries, in India, Australia, and the Argentine, and at last wherever wheat was to be cut. It trebled the output of grain, and the welfare of the people has proven largely dependent on their food supply. It has been an invention of the greatest economic value to the world.