In 1840 he had put his reaper into more perfect shape and now began to manufacture it, first in Cincinnati, then in Chicago. The farmers in the western prairies could not hire laborers enough to harvest their great fields of grain by hand. So the McCormick reaper began to be used in that part of the country. Cyrus H. McCormick, unlike most inventors, was a successful business man. He had to enlarge his factories. To his harvester he kept adding devices until it gathered the grain into sheaves, bound the sheaves with twine, and tossed them out sideways on the ground. He made them so that they would mow grass also.
After his reapers and mowers became well known in America, the successful inventor and manufacturer went abroad to introduce them in Europe. He showed the machine at the first World’s Fair in London, in 1851. People in England laughed, and the London Times reported that the reaper was a “cross between a chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine.”
But when the object of their laughter was taken out harvesting in England, the joke was on the men who had made fun of a machine they could not understand. The newspapers then began to praise the inventor they had ridiculed, and Cyrus H. McCormick awoke one morning and found himself famous. He not only received the Great Medal from the World’s Fair, but was elected an officer of the Legion of Honor in Paris, and received the high honor of being made a member of the French Academy of Science.
So the McCormick boy, who did not mind being laughed at and was never content with doing less than his very best, became not only one of the wealthiest men in America, but added many hundreds of millions of dollars to the wealth of his country, and gave an immense benefit to the world.
ELIAS HOWE AND HIS SEWING MACHINE
ELIAS HOWE was the son of a poor miller. He had to go to work when he was six years old. He was a lame, sickly boy and could never do heavy work. When he was old enough he went away to work in the mills. But as he grew up, his health was still so poor that he had to go back and live with his father.
Elias married when he was twenty-one and, within a few years, he had a wife and three children to support. Once when he was ill, his wife took in sewing to support their little family. As the young father lay on the bed watching his wife slowly plying her needle, he thought what a blessing it would be if a machine could be invented to sew much faster and better than by hand. The idea seemed to fill his mind, for he was an ingenious man. He said to himself, “I can’t do heavy work, but perhaps I can invent that machine.” At first he said nothing about it to his wife, but he watched her taking stitch after stitch for hours at a stretch.