The machine with which the name of Cyrus Hall McCormick has always been associated had many inventors, notably Obed Hussey, who patented his machine in 1833, a year before the first McCormick patent. Hussey's machine was the only practicable one on the market before 1840. It was the McCormick reaper, however, that invaded the Midwest, where the prairie farmer was ready for an efficient harvester that would make extensive Wheat growing possible. In 1847 McCormick moved from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where the first machine was built, to Chicago.
Perhaps, as his biographer contends, McCormick (or his father, Robert McCormick) did most effectively combine the parts essential to a mechanical grain cutter. Other improvements came in the 1850s and 1860s—the self-raker, which dispensed with the job of raking the cut grain off the platform, and then the binder, first using wire to bind the sheaves and later twine. The first self-raker was sold in 1854, seven years before McCormick produced such a machine. The first wire binder was put on the market in 1873, two years before the McCormick binder. Through effective organization the McCormick reaper came to dominate the field. The invention helped facilitate the rapid economic development of the rural Midwest, and the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company's massive factories in Chicago helped transform that city into an industrial giant.
Bibliography
Hutchinson, William T. Cyrus Hall McCormick. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968.
McCormick, Cyrus. The Century of the Reaper. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.
Ozanne, Robert W. A Century of Labor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.
