Their dramatic meeting is best told by Mr. Herbert M. Casson in his interesting volume, entitled "Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work."
"One evening in 1874 a tall man; with a box under his arm, walked diffidently up the steps of the McCormick home in Chicago, and rang the bell. He asked to see Mr. McCormick, and was shown into the parlour, where he found Mr. McCormick, sitting, as usual, in a large and comfortable chair.
"'My name is Withington,' said the stranger; I live in Janesville, Wisconsin. I have here a model of a machine that will automatically bind grain.'
"Now, it so happened that McCormick had been kept awake nearly the whole of the previous night by a stubborn business problem. He could scarcely hold his eyelids apart. And when Withington was in the midst of his explanation, with the intentness of a born inventor, Mr. McCormick fell fast asleep. At such a reception to his cherished machine Withington lost heart. He was a gentle, sensitive man easily rebuffed, and so, when McCormick aroused from his nap, Withington had departed, and was on his way back to Wisconsin. For a few seconds McCormick was uncertain as to whether his visitor had been a reality or a dream. Then he awoke with a start into instant action. A great opportunity had come to him, and he had let it slip. He was at this time making self-rake reapers and Marsh harvesters; but what he wanted—what every reaper manufacturer wanted in 1871—was a self-binder. He at once called one of his trusted workmen.
"'I want you to go to Janesville,' he said. Find a man named Withington and bring him to me by the first train that comes back to Chicago.'
"The next day Withington was brought back, and treated with the utmost courtesy. McCormick studied his invention, and found it to be a most remarkable mechanism. Two steel arms caught each bundle of grain, whirled a wire tightly around it, fastened the two ends together with a twist, cut it loose, and tossed it to the ground. This self-binder was perfect in all its details—as neat and effective a machine as could be imagined. McCormick was delighted. At last, here was a machine that would abolish the binding of grain by hand."
For six years all went well with the McCormick and Withington self-binder. This wonderful wire-twisting machine was working everywhere with clockwork precision, and was believed to be the best that human ingenuity could devise. All at once the manufacturing world was startled with the news that William Deering had made and sold three thousand twine self-binders. Deering, by this dramatic move became in a flash McCormick's most powerful competitor. He was not a farmer's son, like the latter, being bred in the city and trained in a factory. He had been a successful merchant at Maine, then left it to enter the harvester trade. He staked his whole fortune on making twine binders. He won, and McCormick was forced to follow in his wake. The evolution of the reaper into the twine self-binder was an epoch-making event in the agricultural world. It enormously increased the sales. In 1880, 60,000 reapers were sold; five years later the figures had risen to 250,000. Since then, with the exception of the new knot-tying device, there has been no real change in the reaper. It remains the grandest of all agricultural machines, and one of the most astonishing mechanisms ever devised by the brain of man.
McCormick died in 1884. In the span of his own life the reaper was born and brought to perfection. He created it in a remote Virginian village, and he lived to see his catalogue printed in twenty languages, and to know that so long as the human race continues to eat bread the sun will never set on the Empire of his reaper, for somewhere, in every month in all the year, you will find the corn white unto the harvest.
R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
THE RURAL SCIENCE SERIES
Edited by Professor L. H. BAILEY