At this point Cyrus took up the task which his father had reluctantly abandoned. He showed his genius from the very start by adopting a new principle of operation. First of all, he invented the divider to separate the corn to be cut from the corn left standing. Next came the reciprocating blade, and the fingers, the revolving reel, platform, and side draught, and, lastly, the big driving wheel. One day late in the month of July, in the summer of 1831, Cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his reaper. With no spectators save his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, he drove down to a patch of yellow grain. To that little family circle it must have been a moment of intense excitement. Click, click, click—the white blade shot to and fro. What a shout of joy! The wheat is cut and falls upon the platform in a golden, shimmering swathe!
Thus at the early age of twenty-two Cyrus had invented the first practical reaper that the world had seen. And now began his nine years' struggle with adversity, from which he emerged in triumph to become the greatest manufacturer of harvesting machines that America has produced. In order to obtain funds with which to manufacture reapers he started to farm. But he soon found that it was impossible to raise sufficient capital by this means. Near by was a large deposit of iron ore, and he forthwith resolved to build a furnace and make iron. He persuaded his father and the school teacher to become his partners. For several years the furnace did fairly well, when, suddenly, the price of iron fell. The McCormicks were bankrupt. Cyrus gave up the farm, and stuck grimly to his reaper. One day the village constable rode up to the farm door with a summons for a debt of nine-teen dollars, but he was so impressed with the industry of the McCormicks that he had not the heart to serve the notice. It was the darkest hour before the dawn.
The same year (1840) a stranger rode in from the north and drew rein in front of the little log workshop. He was a rough looking man with the homely name of Abraham Smith, but to Cyrus he came as an angel of light. He had come with fifty dollars in his pocket to buy a reaper—the first that was ever sold. A short time later two other farmers came on the same errand, and that summer three reaping machines were working in the wheat-fields of America. In 1842 McCormick sold seven machines, and in 1844 fifty. The home farm had now become a busy factory.
Three years later a friend said to him "Cyrus, why don't you go West with your reaper, where the land is level and labour cheap?"
It was the call of the West.
He travelled over the boundless prairies, and was quick to see that this great land-ocean was the natural home of the reaper. Straightway he transferred his factory to Chicago—then, in 1847, a forlorn little town of less than 10,000 souls. His business flourished. In the great fire of 1871 his factory, which was then turning out 10,000 harvesters a year, was totally destroyed. At the word of his wife he rebuilt it anew with amazing rapidity. And so we find that the tiny workshop in the backwoods of Virginia has become the McCormick City in the heart of Chicago. In the sixty-five years of its life this manufactory has produced over 6,000,000 harvesting machines, and is now pouring them out at the rate of over 7,000 per week. The McCormick Company is now known as the International Harvester Company, and his eldest son, Cyrus H. McCormick, is the President. The annual output is 75,000,000 dollars. It was the reaper that enabled the United States, during the four years of the civil war, not only to feed the armies in the field, but at the same time to export to foreign countries 200,000,000 bushels of wheat. And well might the savants of the French Academy of Science say, when electing Cyrus McCormick a member, that "he had done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."
And now we must trace the evolution of the reaper from its origin on the Walnut Grove Farm to the marvellous machine of to-day. For about thirty years it remained practically unaltered in design, save that seats had been added for the raker and the driver. It did no more than cut the grain and leave it in loose bundles on the ground. It had abolished the sickler and cradler, but there still remained the raker and binder. Might it not be possible to do away with them also, and leave only the driver? Such was the fascinating problem which now confronted the inventor.
In the year 1852 a bedridden cripple called Jearum Atkins bought a McCormick reaper, and had it placed outside his window. To while away the weary hours he actually devised an attachment with two revolving iron arms, which automatically raked off the cut grain from the platform to the ground. It was a grotesque contrivance, and was nicknamed by the farmers the "iron man." Nevertheless, this invention stimulated the manufacture of self-rake reapers, and soon the American farmer would buy no other kind. Thus part of the problem had been solved. The raker was abolished. But there still remained the harder task of supplanting the binder—the man or the woman who gathered up the bundles of cut corn and bound them tightly together with a wisp of straw into the sheaf.
And now another figure appears upon this ever-moving stage, a young man by the name of Charles B. Withington. Born at Akron, Ohio, a year before McCormick invented his reaper, this delicate youth was trained by his father to be a watchmaker. At the age of fifteen, in order to earn pocket-money, he went into the harvest field to bind corn. He was not robust, and the hard, stooping labour under a hot sun would sometimes bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage. There were times after the day's work was done when he was too weary to walk home, and he would throw himself on the stubble to rest. At eighteen he journeyed to the goldfields of California, drifted to Australia, and in the year 1855 arrived back in Wisconsin with 3,000 dollars in his belt. All this money he began to fritter away in trying to invent a self-rake reaper. Suddenly, inspired by the articles of a rural editor, who maintained that the binding of corn should be done by a machine, Withington dropped his self-rake and went straight to work to make a self-binder. He completed his first machine in 1872, but met with much discouragement until, two years later, he came across McCormick.