CHAPTER III

THE INVENTION OF THE REAPER

Not far from the McCormick homestead was the "Old Field School," built of logs and with a part of one of the upper logs cut out to provide a window. Here the boy Cyrus sat on a slab bench and studied five books as though they were the only books in the world,--Murray's Grammar, Dilworth's Arithmetic, Webster's Spelling Book, the Shorter Catechism, and the Bible.

He was a strong-limbed, self-contained, serious-natured boy, always profoundly intent upon what he was doing. Even at the age of fifteen he was inventive. One winter morning he brought to school a most elaborate map of the world, showing the two hemispheres side by side. First he had drawn it in ink upon paper, then pasted the paper upon linen, and hung it upon two varnished rollers. This map, which is still preserved, reveals a remarkable degree of skill and patience; and the fact that a mere lad could conceive of and create such a map was a week's wonder in the little community. "That boy," declared the teacher, "is beyond me."

At about this time he undertook to do a man's work in the reaping of the wheat, and here he discovered that to swing a cradle against a field of grain under a hot summer sun was of all farming drudgeries the severest. Both his back and his brain rebelled against it. One thing at least he could do,--he could make a smaller cradle, that would be easier to swing; and he did this, whittling away in the evening in the little log workshop.

"Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius," said an old laborer who had worked on the McCormick farm. "He was always trying to invent something." "He was a young man of great and superior talents," said a neighbor. At eighteen he studied the profession of surveying, and made a quadrant for his own use. This is still preserved, and bears witness to his good workmanship. From this time until his twenty-second year, there is nothing of exceptional interest recorded of him. He had grown to be a tall, muscular, dignified young man. The neighbors, in later years, remembered him mainly because he was so well dressed on Sundays, in broadcloth coat and beaver hat, and because of his fine treble voice as he led the singing in the country church.

Even as a youth he was absorbed in his inventions and business projects. He had no time for gayeties. In a letter written from Kentucky to a cousin, Adam McChesney, in 1831, he says: "Mr. Hart has two fine daughters, right pretty, very smart, and as rich probably as you would wish; but alas! I have other business to attend to."

Ever since Cyrus was a child of seven, it had been the most ardent ambition of his father to invent a Reaper. He had made one and tried it in the harvest of 1816, but it was a failure. It was a fantastic machine, pushed from behind by two horses. A row of short curved sickles were fastened to upright posts, and the grain was whirled against them by revolving rods. It was highly ingenious, but the sinewy grain merely bunched and tangled around its futile sickles; and the poor old Reaper that would not reap was hauled off the field, to become one of the jokes of the neighborhood.

This failure did not dishearten Robert McCormick. He persevered with Scotch-Irish tenacity, but in secret. Hurt by the jests of the neighbors, he worked thenceforward with the door of his workshop locked, or at night. He hid his Reaper, too, upon a shelf inside the workshop. "He allowed no one to see what he was doing, except his sons," said Davis McCormick, who is now the only living person in the neighborhood with a memory that extends back to that early period. "Yes," said this lone octogenarian, "Robert McCormick was a good man, a true Christian; and he worked for years to make a Reaper. He always kept his plans to himself, and he told his wife that if visitors came to the house, she should send one of the children to fetch him, and not allow the visitors to come to his workshop."

By the early Summer of 1831, Robert McCormick had so improved his Reaper that he gave it a trial in a field of grain. Again it was a failure. It did cut the grain fairly well, but flung it in a tangled heap. As much as this had been done before by other machines, and it was not enough. To cut the grain was only one-half of the problem; the other half of the problem, which up to this time no one had solved, was how to properly handle and deliver the grain after it was cut.

By this time Cyrus had become as much of a Reaper enthusiast as his father. Also, he had been studying out the reasons for his father's failure, and working out in his mind a new plan of construction. How this _new plan_ was slowly moulded into shape by his creative fancy is now told for the first time. A manuscript, written by Cyrus H. McCormick himself, and which has not hitherto been made public, gives a complete description of the process of thought by which he became the inventor of the first practical Reaper. This account, it may be said in explanation, was written by Mr. McCormick shortly before the Chicago fire of 1871. It was to be published at that time, and was in type when the fire came and left not a vestige of the printery. The original manuscript was preserved; but the labor of rebuilding his factory prevented him from carrying out his original design. He wholly forgot his authorship in the troubles of his city; and so his own story of his invention lay untouched among the private papers of the family for thirty-eight years.

"Robert McCormick," says this document, "being satisfied that his principle of operation could not succeed, laid aside and abandoned the further prosecution of his idea." He had labored for fifteen years to make a Reaper that would reap, and he had failed.

At this point Cyrus took up the work that his father had reluctantly abandoned. He had never seen or heard of any Reaper experiments except those of his father; but he believed he saw a better way, and "devoted himself most laboriously to the discovery of a _new principle of operation_."

He showed his originality at the outset by beginning where his father and all other Reaper inventors had left off,--with the cutting of grain that lay in a fallen and tangled mass. He faced the problem worst end first. The Reaper that would cut such grain, he believed, must first separate the grain that is to be cut from the grain that is left standing. It must have at the end of its knife a curved arm--a _divider_. This idea was simple, but in the long history of harvesting grain no one had thought of it before.

Next, in order to cut this snarled and prostrate grain without missing any of it, the knife must have two motions: its forward motion, as drawn by the horses, and also a slashing sideways motion of its own. How was this to be done? McCormick's first thought was to cut the grain with a whirling wheel-knife, but this plan presented too many new difficulties. Suddenly the idea came to him--why not have a straight blade, with a back and forward motion of its own? This was the birth-idea of the _reciprocating blade_, which has been used to this day on all grain-cutting machines. It was not, like the divider, a wholly new conception; but Cyrus McCormick conceived it independently, and did more than any one else to establish it as the basic feature of the Reaper.

The third problem was the supporting of the grain while it was being cut, so that the knife would not merely flatten it to the ground. McCormick solved this by placing a row of _fingers_ at the edge of the blade. These fingers projected a few inches, in such a way that the grain was caught and held in position to be cut. The shape of these fingers was afterwards much improved, to prevent wet grain from clogging the slit in which the knife slid back and forth.

A fourth device was still needed to lift up and straighten the grain that had fallen. This was done by a simple revolving _reel_, such as fishermen use for the drying of their nets. Several of the abortive Reapers that had been tried elsewhere had possessed some sort of a reel; but McCormick made his much larger than any other, so that no grain was too low to escape it.

The fifth factor in this assembling of a Reaper was the _platform_, to catch the cut grain as it fell; and from which the grain was to be raked off by a man who walked alongside of it. The sixth was the idea of putting the shafts on the outside, or stubble side, of the Reaper, making it a _side-draught_, instead of a "push" machine. And the seventh and final factor was the building of the whole Reaper upon one big _driving-wheel_, which carried the weight and operated the reel and cutting-blade. The grain-side end of the blade was at first supported by a wooden runner, and later--the following year--by a small wheel.

Such was the making of the first practical Reaper in the history of the world. It was as clumsy as a Red River ox-cart; but _it reaped_. It was made on right lines. The "new principle" that the youth McCormick laboriously conceived in the little log workshop became the basic type of a wholly new machine. It has never been displaced. Since then there have been 12,000 patents issued for reaper and mower inventions; but not one of them has overthrown the type of the first McCormick Reaper. Not one of the seven factors that he assembled has been thrown aside; and the most elaborate self-binder of to-day is a direct descendant of the crude machine that was thus created by a young Virginian farmer in 1831.

The young inventor toiled "laboriously," he says, to complete his Reaper in time for the harvest of 1831. He was very nearly too late, but a small patch of wheat was left standing at his request; and one day in July, with no spectators except his parents and his excited brothers and sisters, Cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his Reaper, and drove against the yellow grain. The reel revolved and swept the gentle wheat downwards upon the knife. Click! Click! Click! The white steel blade shot back and forth. The grain was cut. It fell upon the platform in a shimmering golden swath. From here it was raked off by a young laborer named John Cash. It was a roughly done specimen of reaping, no doubt. The reel and the divider worked poorly. But for a preliminary test it was a magnificent success. Here, at last, was a Reaper that reaped, the first that had ever been made in any country.

The scene of this first "reaping by horse-power" was then, and is to-day, one of unusual beauty. The field is near by the farm-house, rolling in several undulations to the rim of a winding little rivulet. In the centre of the field is a single tree, a wide-branched white oak, which was probably born before the first colonists arrived at Jamestown. And in the background, not more than two miles distant, rise the tall and jagged crags of the Blue Ridge, twelve sharp peaks flung high from deep ravines, on which the lights and shades are incessantly changing,--a most impressive staging for the first act of the drama of the Reaper.

This McCormick farm, having 600 acres of land, is now owned by the McCormick family. The whole region has changed but little. Once, and once only, the great noisy outside world surged into this quiet valley,--when a Union army under General Butler clattered through it, burning and destroying, and so close to the McCormick homestead that the blue uniforms could be seen from its front windows. Doubtless, when farmers have time to take a proper pride in the history of their own profession, they will visit the McCormick farm as a spot of historic interest,--the place where the New Agriculture was born. It is no longer a difficult place to reach, as it is now possible to lunch to-day in either Chicago or New York and to-morrow in the same comfortable red brick farm-house that sheltered the McCormicks in 1831.

Several days after the advent of the Reaper on the home farm, Cyrus McCormick had improved its reel and divider, and was ready for a public exhibition at the near-by village of Steele's Tavern. Here, with two horses, he cut six acres of oats in an afternoon, a feat which was attested in court in 1848 by his brothers William and Leander, and also by three of the villagers, John Steele, Eliza Steele, and Dr. N. M. Hitt. Such a thing at that time was incredible. It was equal to the work of six laborers with scythes, or twenty-four peasants with sickles. It was as marvellous as though a man should walk down the street carrying a dray-horse on his back.

The next year, 1832, Cyrus McCormick came out with his Reaper into what seemed to him "the wide, wide world." He gave a public exhibition near the little town of Lexington, which lay eighteen miles south of the farm. Fully one hundred people were present--several political leaders of local fame, farmers, professors, laborers, and a group of negroes who frolicked and shouted in uncomprehending joy.

At the start, it appeared as though this new contraption of a machine, which was unlike anything else that human eyes had ever seen, was to prove a grotesque failure. The field was hilly, and the Reaper jolted and slewed so violently that John Ruff, the owner of the field, made a loud protest.

"Here! This won't do," he shouted. "Stop your horses. You are rattling the heads off my wheat."

This was a hard blow to the young farmer-inventor. Several laborers, who were openly hostile to the machine as their rival in the labor market, began to jeer with great satisfaction. "It's a humbug," said one. "Give me the old cradle yet, boys," said another. These men were hardened and bent and calloused with the drudgery of harvesting. They worked twelve and fourteen hours a day for less than a nickel an hour. But they were as resentful toward a Reaper as the drivers of stage-coaches were to railroads, or as the hackmen of to-day are towards automobiles.

At this moment of apparent defeat, a man of striking appearance, who had been watching the floundering of the Reaper with great interest, came to the rescue.

"I'll give you a fair chance, young man," he said. "That field of wheat on the other side of the fence belongs to me. Pull down the fence and cross over."

This friend in need was the Honorable William Taylor, who was several years later a candidate for the governorship of Virginia. His offer was at once accepted by Cyrus McCormick, and as the second field was fairly level, he laid low six acres of wheat before sundown. This was no more than he had done in 1831, but on this occasion he had conquered a larger and more incredulous audience.

After the sixth acre was cut, the Reaper was driven with great acclaim into the town of Lexington and placed on view in the court-house square. Here it was carefully studied by a Professor Bradshaw of the Lexington Female Academy, who finally announced in a loud and emphatic voice, "This--machine--is worth--a hundred--thousand--dollars." This praise, from "a scholar and a gentleman," as McCormick afterwards called him, was very encouraging. And still more so was the quiet word of praise from Robert McCormick, who said, "It makes me feel proud to have a son do what I could not do."

Of all who were present on that memorable summer day, not one is now alive. Neither in Lexington nor in Staunton--the towns that lay on either side of the McCormick farm--can we find any one who saw the Reapers of 1831 and 1832. But among those who testified at various lawsuits that they had seen the Lexington Reaper operate were Colonel James McDowell, Colonel John Bowyer, Colonel Samuel Reed, Colonel A. T. Barclay, Dr. Taylor, William Taylor, John Ruff, John W. Houghawout, John Steele, James Moore, and Andrew Wallace. There was an old lady, also, in 1885, Miss Polly Carson, who told how she had seen the Reaper hauled along the road by two horses, which, she said, "had to be led by a couple of darkies, because they were scared to death by the racket of the machine." And she expressed the general unbelief of that day, very likely, by saying, "I thought it was a right smart curious sort of a thing, but that it wouldn't come to much."

Cyrus McCormick was far from being the first to secure a Reaper patent. He was the forty-seventh. Twenty-three others in Europe and twenty-three in the United States had invented machines of varying inefficiency; but there was not one of these which could have been improved into the proper shape. Without any exception, the rival manufacturers who rose up in later years to fight McCormick did him the homage of copying his Reaper; and certainly none of them attempted to offer for sale any type of machine that was invented prior to 1831.

A careful study of the pre-McCormick Reapers reveals one fault common to all,--they were made by theorists, to cut ideal grain in ideal fields. Some of them, if grain always grew straight and was perfectly willing to be cut, might have been fairly useful. They assuredly might have succeeded if grain grew in a parlor. But to cut actual grain in actual fields was another matter, and quite beyond their power. None of them, apparently, knew the fundamental difference between a Reaper and a mower. They did not observe that grain is easy to cut but hard to handle, while grass is hard to cut and easy to handle; and they persisted in the assumption that grain could be reaped by a mower.

These inventors who failed, but who doubtless blazed the way by their failures to the final success of McCormick, were not, as he was, a practical farmer on rough and hilly ground. One was a clergyman, who devised a six-wheel chariot, with many pairs of scissors, and which was to be pushed by horses and steered by a rudder that in rough ground would jerk a man's arm out of joint. A second of these inventors was a sailor, who experimented with a few stalks of straight grain stuck in gimlet holes in his workshop floor. A third was an actor, who had built a Reaper that would cut artificial grain on the stage. A fourth was a school-teacher, a fifth a machinist, and so on. In no instance can we find that any one of these pre-McCormick inventors was a farmer, who therefore knew what practical difficulties had to be overcome.

The farmers, on the other hand, thought first of these difficulties and scoffed at the parlor inventors. The editor of the "Farmer's Register" spoke the opinion of most farmers of that time when he said that "an insurmountable difficulty will sometimes be found to the use of reaping-machines in the state of the growing crops, which may be twisted and laid flat in every possible direction. A whole crop may be ravelled and beaten down by high winds and heavy rains in a single day."

One of the basic reasons, therefore, for the success of Cyrus McCormick was the fact that he was not a parlor inventor. He was primarily a farmer. He knew what wheat was and how it grew. And his first aim in making a reaper was not to produce a mechanical curiosity, nor to derive a fortune from the sale of his patent, but to cut the grain on his father's farm.

So far as the pre-McCormick inventors are concerned, the whole truth about them seems to be that a few invented fractional mowers or reapers that were fairly good as far as they went, and that most of them invented nothing that became of any lasting value. Nine-tenths of them were pathfinders in the sense that they showed what ought _not_ to be done.

Very little attention would have been given them had it not been for the persistent effort made by rival manufacturers to detract from McCormick's reputation as an inventor. This they did in a wholly impersonal manner, of course, so that they should not be obliged to pay him royalties, and because his prestige as the original inventor of the Reaper enabled him to outsell them among the farmers.

But now that the competition of Reaper manufacturers has been tempered by consolidation, the time has arrived to do justice to Cyrus McCormick as the inventor of the Reaper. The stock phrase,--"He was less of an inventor than a business man," which was so widely used against him during his lifetime, ought now in all fairness to be laid aside. The fact is, as we have seen, that he was schooled as a boy into an inventive habit of mind; and that before his invention of the Reaper, he had devised a new grain-cradle, a hillside plow, and a self-sharpening plow. There is abundant corroborative evidence in the letters which he wrote to his father and brothers, instructing them to "make the divider and wheel post longer," to "put the crank one inch farther back," and so forth. Also, in the will of Robert McCormick, there is a clause authorizing the executor to pay a royalty to Cyrus of fifteen dollars apiece on whatever machines were sold by the family during that season, showing that the father, who of all men was in the best position to know, regarded Cyrus as the inventor.

Of all the manufacturers who fought McCormick in the patent suits of early days, three only have survived to see the passing of the McCormick Centenary--Ralph Emerson, C. W. Marsh, and William N. Whiteley. In response to a question as to Cyrus McCormick's place as an inventor, Mr. Whiteley said: "McCormick invented the divider and the practical reel; and he was the first man to make the Reaper a success in the field." Mr. Marsh said: "He was a meritorious inventor, although he combined the ideas of other men with his own; and he produced the first practical side-delivery machine in the market." And Mr. Emerson said: "The enemies of Cyrus H. McCormick have said that he was not an inventor, but I say that he was an inventor of eminence."

Thus it appears that the invention of the Reaper was not in any sense unique; it came about by an evolutionary process such as produced all other great discoveries and inventions. First come the dreamers, the theorists, the heroic innovators who awaken the world's brain upon a new line of thought. Then come the pioneers who solve certain parts of the problem and make suggestions that are of practical value. And then, in the fulness of time, comes one masterful man who is more of a doer than a dreamer, who works out the exact combination of ideas to produce the result, and establishes the new product as a necessary part of the equipment of the whole human family.

Cyrus Hall McCormick invented the Reaper. He did more--he invented the business of making Reapers and selling them to the farmers of America and foreign countries. He held preëminence in this line, with scarcely a break, until his death; and the manufacturing plant that he founded is to-day the largest of its kind. Thus, it is no more than an exact statement of the truth to say that he did more than any other member of the human race to abolish the famine of the cities and the drudgery of the farm--to feed the hungry and straighten the bent backs of the world.