Vice-President, met at Baltimore on May 1, 1844. The overhead wire had
been started from Washington toward Baltimore, and by that day
twenty-two miles of it were in working order. The day before the
convention met Morse had arranged with Vail that certain signals
should mean that certain candidates had been nominated. Henry Clay was
named for President, and the news was carried by railroad to the point
where Morse had stretched his wire. He signaled it to Washington, and
the Capitol heard it long before the first messages arrived by train.
On May 24, 1844, the line was completed, and Miss Ellsworth was
invited to send the first message from the room of the United States
Supreme Court to Baltimore. She chose the Biblical words “What hath
God wrought?” and this was sent over the telegraph. Vail received the
message in Baltimore, and the first demonstration was a complete
success. The younger man had added an improvement of his own; instead
of the dots and dashes being indicated by the markings of a pen or
pencil they were embossed on the paper with a metal stylus.
An incident in connection with the Democratic Convention, which was
then in session in Baltimore for the purpose of nominating
presidential candidates, added to the public interest in Morse’s
telegraph. The Democrats had named James K. Polk for President and
Silas Wright for Vice-President. The news was sent by wire to
Washington, and Mr. Wright sent his message declining the honor over
the telegraph. The chairman of the meeting, Hendrick B. Wright,
received the message. In a letter to Benson J. Lossing he says, “As
the presiding officer of the body I read the despatch, but so
incredulous were the members as to the authority of the evidence
before them that the convention adjourned over to the following day to
await the report of the committee sent over to Washington to get
_reliable_ information on the subject.” The committee returned with
word that the telegraph message had been correct. Then, all but the
convention committee being excluded from the telegraph room in
Baltimore, message after message was sent over the wire by Vail to
Morse and Silas Wright in Washington. The committee used many
arguments to urge Wright’s acceptance; he answered them all,
persisting in his refusal; and finally this decision was reported to
the convention, which nominated Mr. Dallas in his place. The story of
the part the new invention had played quickly spread abroad, and added
to the intense public interest now focussed on it.
On April 1, 1845, the first telegraph line between Washington and
Baltimore was opened for general use. Congress had appropriated $8,000
to maintain it for the first year, and placed it under the direction
of the Postmaster-General. The official charge was one cent for every
four characters transmitted. The receipts of the first four days were
one cent, for the fifth day twelve and a half cents, for the seventh
sixty cents, for the eighth one dollar and thirty-two cents, for the
ninth one dollar and four cents. Morse offered to sell his invention
to the government for $100,000, but the Postmaster-General declined
the offer, stating in his report that the service “had not satisfied
him that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues
could be made equal to its expenditures.”
With the public opening of the line between Washington and Baltimore
the practical success of the new electric telegraph was assured. The
Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed to carry a wire from New York to
Philadelphia, and thence another line was run to Baltimore in 1846.
The telegraph being an accomplished fact, pirates of the patent now
appeared, and for a course of years Morse and his partners had to
fight for their rights. Henry O’Reilly, who had been employed in
building the first lines, contracted to construct another from
Philadelphia to St. Louis, and when that was finished he formed a
company known as the People’s Line, to run to New Orleans. He claimed
to use instruments entirely different from those patented by Morse,
and so to be free from the payment of royalties. Morse applied for an
injunction, and on appeal the Federal Supreme Court decided in his
favor. Other similar suits followed, and in each one the decision
justified Morse’s contention. The conclusion was that even though
other men had known of the possibilities by experiment, it was the
fact that he had first put the matter into practical form directed
toward a specific purpose, and hence was to be regarded in law as the
inventor.
The telegraph grew with the country. The Western Union Company
followed the stage-coach across the plains to California, and soon the
frontier towns were linked to the large cities of the East. Other men
took up the work in other lines, and in 1854 Cyrus W. Field formed the
Atlantic Telegraph Company to lay a cable between America and Europe.
As Morse had said when he first began seriously to study the subject
on board the _Sully_, “If it will go ten miles without stopping I can
make it go around the globe.”
The inventor found himself universally honored, and at last a very
wealthy man. He married Miss Griswold of Poughkeepsie, and bought an
estate of two hundred acres near that city. He was given degrees by
American and European universities and societies, was made a member of
the French Legion of Honor, received orders of knighthood from the
rulers of Spain and Italy, Denmark, Turkey, and Portugal. In 1858 the
Emperor of the French called a Congress in Paris to honor Morse, and
the Congress awarded him a gift of 400,000 francs as a token of
gratitude. In his eightieth year his statue in bronze was placed in
Central Park, New York, and his countrymen did their utmost to show
him their appreciation of his great achievement. He died in 1872, a
short time after he had unveiled a statue of Benjamin Franklin in New
York’s Printing-house Square.
Morse was the inventor, but his partner Alfred Vail had a great share
in making the present telegraph. He discarded the original porte-rule
and type of the transmitter for the key or lever, moved up and down by
hand to complete or break the circuit. He perfected the dot and dash
code, he invented the device for embossing the message, and replaced
the inking pen by a metal disc, smeared with ink, that rolled the dots
and dashes on the paper. When it was found that the telegraph
operators would read the signals from the clicking of the marking
lever instead of from the paper, he made an instrument which had no
marking device, and in which the signals were sounded by the striking
of the lever of the armature against the metal stops. This “sounder”
soon drove out the old Morse recorder. The present instrument is in
its mechanical form far more the work of Vail than of Morse.
XI
McCORMICK AND THE REAPER
1809-1884
The same sturdy pioneer stock that gave America Daniel Boone and
Lincoln, Robert Fulton and Andrew Jackson, produced the inventor of
the reaper. He came of a line of resourceful, fearless Scotch-Irish
settlers, bone of the bone and sinew of the sinew of those generations
that laid the broad foundations of the United States. His
great-grandfather had been an Indian fighter in the colony of
Pennsylvania, his grandfather had moved to Virginia and fought in the
Revolution, and his father had built a log-house and tilled a farm in
that strip of arable Virginia land that lay between the Blue Ridge and
the Alleghany Mountains. He prospered, and added neighboring farms to
his original holding; he had two grist-mills, two sawmills, a
blacksmith shop, a smelting-furnace, and a distillery; he invented new
makes of farm machinery, and in addition was a man of considerable
reading, able to hold his own in discussion with the lawyers and the
clergymen of the countryside. He was of that same well-developed type
of countryman of whom so many were to be found in the thirteen
original states and the borderlands to the west, that settler type
which was the real backbone of the young country.
The McCormick house and farm was almost a small village in itself.
There were eight children, and their shoes were cobbled, their clothes
woven, their very beds and chairs and tables built at home. Whatever
was needed could be done, the family were always busy within doors or
without, and the spirit of helpfulness and invention was in the air.
Into such a setting Cyrus Hall McCormick was born in 1809, the same
year that saw the birth of Lincoln.
He went to one of the Old Field Schools, so called because it was
built on ground that had been abandoned for farm use. He learned what
other boys and girls were learning in simple country schools, but he
studied harder than most of them, because he had a keen desire to
understand thoroughly whatever subject he started. He saw his father
busy in his workshop at all spare moments, and he took him as a
pattern. After weeks of work he brought his teacher a remarkably exact
map of the world, drawn to scale, and outlined in ink on paper pasted
on linen, and fastened on two rollers. The work showed his ingenious
fancy, and perhaps determined his father to have him educated as a
surveyor. At eighteen he began this study, and had soon won a good
reputation in the neighborhood as an engineer. Much of the time he
spent in the fields with his father, and here he soon learned that
reaping wheat was no easy task, and that swinging a wheat cradle under
the summer sun was hard on both the temper and the back.
Many men had tried to lighten the farmer’s labor in cutting grain, and
Cyrus McCormick’s father had long had the ambition to invent a
reaper. He had succeeded in building a cumbersome machine that was
pushed at the back by a pair of horses. The plan of the machine was
well enough; it consisted of a row of short curved sickles that were
fastened to upright posts. Revolving rods drove the wheat up against
the sickles. The machine acted properly, but the grain would not.
Instead of standing up straight and separated to be cut the wheat
would more often come in great bunches, twisting about the sickles and
getting tangled in the machinery. Mr. McCormick tried the machine in
the harvesting of 1816, but it would not work, and had to be carted
away to the workshop as an invention gone wrong. But he persevered
with this idea, and from time to time built other models. After a
number of years he brought forth a machine that would cut, but left
the wheat after cutting in a badly tangled shape. He saw that this was
not sufficient. The reaper to be of real use must dispose of the grain
properly as well as shear the stalks.
Cyrus now took up the work that his father reluctantly abandoned. He
decided to build his reaper on entirely new lines. First he dealt with
the problem of how to separate the grain that was to be cut from that
which was to be left standing. This he finally solved by adding a
curved arm, or divider, to the end of his reaper’s blade. In this way
the grain that was to be cut would be properly fed to the knife.
But the grain was apt to be badly tangled before the reaper reached
it, and his machine must be able to cut that which was pressed down
and out of shape as well as that which was standing straight. To
accomplish this he decided that his knife must have two motions, one a
forward cut, and the other sideways. He tried many plans before he
finally hit upon one that solved this for him. It was a straight knife
blade that moved forward and backward, cutting with each motion. This
idea became known as the reciprocating blade.
Yet even though the machine could divide the grain properly, and the
knife cut with a double motion, there was the possibility that the
blade might simply press the grain down and so slide over it. This was
especially apt to be the case after a rain, or when the grain had been
badly blown about by the wind. The problem now was how to hold it
upright. He found the solution lay in adding a row of indentations
that projected a few inches from the edge of the knife, and acted like
fingers in catching the stalks and holding them in place to be cut.
These three ideas, the divider, the reciprocating blade, and the
fingers, were all fundamental devices of the machine Cyrus McCormick
was building. They all met the question of how the grain could be cut.
To these he next added a revolving reel, that would lift any grain
that had fallen and straighten it, and a platform to catch the grain
as it was cut and fell. His idea was that a man should walk along
beside the reaper and rake off the grain as it fell upon the platform.
Two more devices, and his first machine was completed. One was to have
the shafts placed on the outside of the reaper, or so that the horse
would pull it sideways, instead of having to push it, as had been the
case with his father’s model. The other was to have the whole machine
practically operated by one big wheel, which should bear the weight
and move the knife and the reel.
It had taken young McCormick many months to work out all these
problems, and there were only one or two weeks each year, the harvest
weeks, when he could actually try his machine. He wanted to use it in
the spring of 1831, but he found that the work of finishing all the
necessary details was enormous. He begged his father to leave a small
patch of wheat for him to try to cut, and at last, one day in July of
that year, he drove his cumbersome machine into the field. All his
family watched as the reaper headed toward the grain. They saw the
wheat gathered and swept down upon the knife, they saw the blade move
back and forth and cut the grain, and then saw it fall upon the little
platform. The machine worked with hitches, not nearly so smoothly nor
so efficiently as it should, but it did work; it gathered the grain in
and it left it in good shape to be raked off the platform. The trial
proved that such a machine could be made to do the work, and that was
all that the inventor wanted.
He drove it back to his workshop and made certain changes in the reel
and the divider. Then, several days later, he drove it over to the
little settlement at Steele’s Tavern, and cut six acres of oats in one
afternoon. That was a marvelous feat, and caused great wonder in the
countryside, but the harvesting season had ended, and the inventor
would have to wait a year before he could prove the use of his machine
again.
By the next year McCormick was ready for a larger audience. The town
of Lexington lay some eighteen miles south of his home, and he made
arrangements with a farmer there, named John Ruff, to give an
exhibition of his reaper in the latter’s field. Over a hundred people
were present when McCormick arrived, all curious to see what could be
done with the complicated-looking machine. Many of them were
harvesters themselves, and none too eager to see a mechanical device
enter into competition for their work. The field was hilly and rough,
and the reaper careened about in it like a ship in a gale. The farmer
grew indignant, and protested that McCormick would ruin all his wheat,
and the laborers began to jeer and joke at the machine’s expense. The
exhibition gave every sign of proving a failure when one of the
spectators called out that he owned the next field and would be glad
to give McCormick a chance there. This field was level, and the young
man quickly turned his reaper into it. Before sunset he had cut six
acres of wheat, and convinced his audience that his machine was a
great improvement over the old method. That evening he drove the
reaper to the court-house square and explained its working to the
towns people. Very few of them saw how it was to revolutionize the
farmer’s labor, but one or two did. Professor Bradshaw, of the local
academy, studied the machine, and then stated publicly that in his
opinion, “This machine is worth a hundred thousand dollars.”
[Illustration: THE EARLIEST REAPER]
But if Cyrus McCormick had been fortunate in growing up on a farm
where he could study the problem of cutting grain at first hand he was
now to find that he was not so fortunate when it came to building
other reapers and marketing them. His home was four days’ travel from
Richmond. He must have money to get the iron for his machines, to
advertise, and to pay agents to try to sell them. He had very little
money. He did advertise in the _Lexington Union_ in September, 1833,
offering reapers for sale at fifty dollars; but there were no answers
to his advertisements. So skeptical were the farmers that it was seven
years before one bought a reaper of him. But he had faith enough in
his invention to take out a patent on it in 1834.
Until now McCormick had depended on the farm for his livelihood, but
there was little profit in this, and he turned his attention to a
deposit of iron ore in the neighborhood, and built a furnace and began
to make iron. This succeeded until the panic of 1837 reached the
Virginia country and brought debt and lowered prices with it. Cyrus
surrendered his farm and what other property he had to his creditors.
None of them was sufficiently interested in the crude reaper to
consider it worth taking.
But the inventor hung on to his faith in this machine, although no one
appeared to buy it, and the expense he had gone to in making it had
practically bankrupted him. And his faith met with its reward, for one
day in 1840 a stranger rode up to the door of his workshop and offered
fifty dollars for a reaper. He had seen one of the machines on
exhibition, and had decided to try it. A little later two other
farmers who lived on the James River appeared and gave McCormick two
more orders. He had the satisfaction of knowing that in the harvest of
1840 three of his reapers were having a trying out.
The next year he was busy trying to perfect a blade that would cut wet
grain. This took him weeks of experimenting, but at last he found that
a serrated edge of a certain pattern would produce the effect he
wanted. He added this to the new machines he was building, fixed the
price of the reaper at one hundred dollars, and in 1842 sold seven
machines, in 1843 twenty-nine, and in 1844 fifty. At last he had
justified himself, and the log workshop had become a busy factory.
An invention of such great value to the farmer naturally advertised
itself through the country districts. Men who heard of a machine that
would cut one hundred and seventy-five acres of wheat in less than
eight days--as happened in one case--naturally decided that it was
worth investigating. And those who already owned machines saw a chance
to make money by selling to their neighbors. One man paid McCormick
$1,333 for the reaper agency of eight counties, another $500 for the
right in five other counties, and a business man offered $2,500 for
the agency in southern Virginia. Meantime orders were coming in from
the distant states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, and the
little home factory was being pushed to the utmost.
But it was not only difficult to obtain the necessary materials for
building reapers on the remote Virginia farm, it was almost impossible
to ship the machines ordered in time for the harvests. Those that went
west had to be taken by wagon to Scottsville, sent down the canal to
Richmond, put on shipboard for the long journey down the James River
to the Atlantic and so by ocean to New Orleans, changed there to a
river steamer that should take them up the Mississippi and by the Ohio
River to the distributing point of Cincinnati. Many delays might
happen in such a long trip, and many delays did happen, and in several
cases the reapers did not reach the farmers who had ordered them until
long after the harvesting season was over. McCormick saw that he must
build his reapers in a more central place.
At that time labor was very scarce in the great central region of the
country, and the farms were enormous. The wheat was going to waste,
for there were not enough scythes and sickles to cut it. McCormick
started on a trip through the middle West, and what he saw convinced
him that his reaper would soon be an absolute necessity on every farm.
All he needed was to find the best point for building his machines and
shipping them. He studied this matter with the greatest care, and
finally decided that the strategic place was the little town of
Chicago, situated on one of the Great Lakes, and half-way between the
prairies of the West and the commercial depots and factories of the
eastern seaboard.
Chicago in 1847 was still little more than a frontier town. It had
fought gamely with floods and droughts, with cholera and panics, with
desperadoes and with land thieves. But men saw that it was bound to
grow, for railroads would have to come to bring the wheat and others
to carry it away, and that meant that some day it would be a great
metropolis. McCormick, like most of the other business builders who
were streaming into Chicago, only wanted credit to enable him to build
and sell his goods, and he was fortunate enough to find a rich and
prominent citizen named William B. Ogden, who was ready to give him
credit and enter into partnership with him.
Ogden gave McCormick $25,000 for a half interest in the business of
making reapers, and started at once to build a factory. At last the
inventor was firmly established. He arranged to sell five hundred
reapers for the harvest of 1848, and as one after another was sent out
into the great wheat belts and set up and tried, the farmers who saw
them decided that the reapers spelled prosperity for them. The
business grew, and at the end of two years, when the partners found it
wiser to dissolve their firm, McCormick was able to tell Ogden that he
would pay him back the $25,000 that he had invested, and give him
$25,000 more for interest and profits. Ogden accepted, and McCormick
became sole owner of the business.
Cyrus McCormick was not only an inventor, but a business-builder of
the rarest talent, one of the great pioneers in a field that was later
to be cultivated in the United States to a remarkable degree. He knew
he had a machine that would lessen labor and increase wealth wherever
wheat was grown, and he felt that it was his mission to see that the
reaper should do its share in the progress of the world. In that sense
he was more than a mere business man; but in another sense he was a
gigantic business-builder. Just as he had studied the problem of
cutting wheat with the object of producing the most efficient machine
possible, so he now studied the problem of selling his reapers in such
a way that every farmer should own one. He believed in liberal
advertising, and he had posters printed with a picture of the reaper
at the top, and below it a formal guarantee warranting the machine’s
performance absolutely. There was a space beneath this for the
signature of the farmer who bought, and the agent who sold, and two
witnesses. The price of the reaper was one hundred and twenty dollars,
and the buyer paid down thirty dollars, and the balance at the end of
six months, provided the reaper would cut one and a half acres an
hour, and fulfil the other requirements. This guarantee, with a chance
to obtain the money back if the purchase was unsatisfactory, was a new
idea, and appealed to every one as a most sincere and honorable way of
doing business. More than this, he sold for a fixed price, which was
in many respects a new method of selling, and he printed in newspapers
and farm journals letters he had received from farmers telling of
their satisfaction with the reaper. In these new ways he laid the
foundation of an enormous business.