The American inventor, manufacturer, and philanthropist Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-1884) was the first to successfully mechanize grain harvesting.

Cyrus McCormick was born in rural Virginia and received a limited formal education. His interest in mechanical problems led him to seek improvements in various farm implements, and in 1831 he got a patent for a hillside plow.

During the early years of the 19th century, farming was still largely a hand operation. Animals, used exclusively for transportation, plowing, and harrowing, provided the only other power. During the first half of the century, inventors concentrated on trying to bring power to bear on harvesting, which was not only exhausting but highly seasonal. In 1831 McCormick, living in a grain-producing region, turned his attention to this problem, which had also long intrigued his father.

In approaching the problem of harvesting by machine, McCormick made progress almost immediately, and the initial seven principal parts of his reaper have remained standard down to the present time. He was not satisfied with his success, however, and continued to improve his machine while working on other problems. In 1832, for example, he took out a patent for a self-sharpening horizontal plow. In 1834 he was spurred on to more work on his reaper by the news that Obed Hussey had announced a reaper of his own. He immediately warned Hussey that he had had a working reaper previous to 1833 and proceeded at long last to take out a patent on June 21, 1834.

The announcement of two new reapers was met with some skepticism. McCormick was cautious too. For the next several years, while operating an iron furnace in Virginia, he continued to make improvements on his reaper. When the Panic of 1837 wiped out his iron venture, he began selling his reapers to the public. Beginning in 1844, he issued licenses to individuals in different parts of the country to manufacture the machines. This proved to be a mistake because he was unable to control the quality of the reapers made under these agreements, and poorly constructed machines were giving his invention an undeserved bad name. In 1847 he erected his own reaper factory in Chicago. He was so successful that by 1850 he had virtually cornered the national market for reapers, despite the fact that his patent had run out in 1848 and he already had as many as 30 rivals in the field - a figure that was to rise to at least 100 ten years later. Obed Hussey was still his major competitor.

The two rivals had a well-publicized contest in 1851 at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition. On a wet July day in a field of green wheat, the McCormick Virginia Reaper (as it was called) handily beat the Hussey machine. There were then no other reapers in the British Isles, and the effect of this demonstration was dramatic. The generally anti-American London Times wrote that "the reaping machine from the United States is the most valuable contribution from abroad, to the stock of our previous knowledge, that we have yet discovered."

McCormick continued to expand his factory, and the reaper itself was constantly improved, though the actual inventive work after about 1860 was left to mechanics hired by the firm. McCormick himself was embroiled in many court fights but was successful on that front as well. The machine was most widely used in the Middle West, as McCormick knew it would be when he built his factory in Chicago. The South remained unmechanized for many years after the Civil War; and as late as the beginning of the 20th century, harvesting in New England was still primarily a hand operation. By that time in the Far West, however, the machine had been transformed into a steam-powered, self-propelled combine that both cut and threshed the grain in one pass across the field. The basic unit was still, of course, McCormick's original reaper.

The last quarter century of McCormick's life was devoted to good works and to building his industrial empire. His innovations of this period were largely managerial rather than mechanical. He invested heavily in western mines, was a supporter of the idea for a canal across Nicaragua, and was a director of such enterprises as the Union Pacific Railroad. As a philanthropist, he patronized religion extensively. In 1878 he was honored by election to the prestigious French Academy of Sciences for "having done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."

Further Reading

The standard biography of McCormick is William T. Hutchinson, Cyrus Hall McCormick (2 vols., 1930-1935). A more popular, but biased, account is Cyrus McCormick, The Century of the Reaper (1931). The claim that Robert McCormick, not his son Cyrus Hall, deserves credit for the reaper is made in Norbert Lyons, The McCormick Reaper Legend: The True Story of a Great Invention (1955). The case for Hussey is made in Follett L. Greeno, ed., Obed Hussey, Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap (1912).

For more information on Cyrus Hall McCormick, visit Britannica.com.

(1809-1884), inventor, businessman, and philanthropist. Born on a farm in Rockbridge County, Virginia, McCormick was raised in a conservative Presbyterian home.

At an early age he became interested in machines that would lighten the burden of farm labor and in 1831 built a mechanical reaper in his father's farm workshop. Most of the principles he incorporated had been tried earlier, but he integrated them into a workable, horse-drawn reaper. The machine included a cutting bar, a reel, a divider, guards over the reciprocating knives, a platform on which the grain fell after being cut, and a gear wheel. The next year he made improvements and demonstrated his reaper's capabilities on several nearby farms. He patented the machine in June 1834.

McCormick further improved his reaper in the late 1830s and marketed a few in the early 1840s. At first he contracted with manufacturers to produce machines to his specifications, but that arrangement did not prove satisfactory because he could not control quality. In 1847 he moved to Chicago, closer to the nation's main grain-producing areas, and set up his own factory. Meanwhile, he had become involved in litigation with Obed Hussey who had patented a reaper in 1833. The courts confirmed Hussey's patents in 1843, which left McCormick without overall patent protection for his machine.

Nevertheless, McCormick's business expanded and prospered. By 1856 his factory in Chicago was producing forty reapers a day, and he had become a millionaire. He began to sell reapers in Europe in the early 1850s and eventually sold thousands of machines there. McCormick improved his reapers by adding such refinements as a self-rake device to move the grain off the platform. In 1875 he produced a wire binder and in 1881 a twine binder. Although intense competition existed among reaper manufacturers, McCormick came to lead the field. He was an ambitious, aggressive, and persevering man who successfully combined an inventive talent with shrewd business practices. He united standardized procedures, mass production, aggressive advertising, and the extension of warranties and credit to expand his business throughout the country.

McCormick's achievement was to invent, manufacture, and distribute a machine that greatly reduced the amount of farm labor needed in grain production. It took twenty hours to harvest an acre of wheat in 1830 compared to less than one hour in 1895. Thus, he made a major contribution to the revolution in agricultural productivity in the nineteenth century.

McCormick married Nancy Fowler in 1858, a strong, practical woman with good business instincts who proved to be a great help to her husband. A wealthy man for his time, McCormick made substantial gifts, mainly to Presbyterian schools and seminaries. His strong interest in, and support of, the Presbyterian Seminary of the Northwest in Chicago prompted a renaming of that institution to the McCormick Theological Seminary after his death.

Bibliography:

William T. Hutchinson, Cyrus Hall McCormick: Seed-Time, 1809-1856 (1930) and Cyrus Hall McCormick: Harvest, 1856-1884 (1935); Cyrus McCormick, The Century of the Reaper (1931).

Author:

Gilbert C. Fite

See also Agriculture; Philanthropy; Science and Technology.

1809–84, inventor of the reaper, b. Rockbridge co., Va. His father, Robert McCormick (1780–1846), had worked intermittently for over 20 years at his blacksmith shop on a reaping machine, but had given it up before Cyrus, his eldest son, began working on different principles. The first public demonstration of the reaper, as constructed by Cyrus, took place in July, 1831, and was a success, although he did not patent it until after Obed Hussey announced his invention in 1834. McCormick's reaper contained the straight reciprocating knife, guards, reel, divider, platform, main-drive wheel, and other innovations that are essential features of every satisfactory harvesting machine. His early machines were made for local use, and not until more than 10 years later did he begin in earnest to expand his market. In 1847 he built his Chicago factory; in 1851 he introduced the reaper into England and, subsequently, into other European countries. He continued to patent improvements and demonstrated his machine in the field, often in competition with Hussey's reaper. After 1850 many strong competitors appeared and Hussey gave up, while only McCormick's unusual business ability kept him in the running. He was quick to purchase promising inventions and added the self-rake, hand binder, and twine binder.

Bibliography

See biographies by W. T. Hutchinson (2 vol., 2d ed. 1968) and H. N. Casson (1909, repr. 1971).

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