McCormick not to put the machine on the market. All the cog-wheels were
of wood. There was no place upon it for either the driver or the raker.
The former rode on the near horse and the latter followed on foot,
raking the grain from it as best he could. But it cut grain fast, and
both father and son were so impressed by its possibilities as
foreshadowed in even this crude affair, that for the next few years they
devoted their time, money, and thoughts to it. Robert McCormick was as
enthusiastic as his son, and he is rightly entitled to a share of the
honor, for his invention of 1816 turned the attention of his son to the
problem and pointed out the radical errors to be avoided. A year after
its first trial, with certain improvements, the reaper cut fifty acres
of wheat in so perfect and rapid a manner as to insure its practical
value beyond all doubt. The self-restraint shown by McCormick in
refusing to sell machines until he was satisfied with them shows the
man. The patent was granted in 1834, but for six years he kept at work
experimenting, changing, improving, during the short periods of each
harvest. In a letter to the Commissioner of Patents, on file in the
Patent Office, Mr. McCormick said: "From the experiment of 1831 until
the harvest of 1840 I did not sell a reaper, although during that time I
had many exhibitions of it, for experience proved to me that it was best
for the public as well as for myself that no sales were made, as defects
presented themselves that would render the reaper unprofitable in other
hands. Many improvements were found necessary, requiring a great deal of
thought and study. I was sometimes flattered, at other times
discouraged, and at all times deemed it best not to attempt the sale of
machines until satisfied that the reaper would succeed."
[Illustration: Interior of the Blacksmith Shop where the First Reaper
was Built.]
About 1835 the McCormicks engaged in a partnership for the smelting of
iron ore. The reaper, as a business pursuit, was yet in the distance,
and the new iron industry offered large profits. The panic of 1837 swept
away these hopes. Cyrus sacrificed all he had, even the farm given him
by his father, to settle his debts, and his scrupulous integrity in this
matter turned disaster into blessing, for it compelled him to take up
the reaper with renewed energy. With the aid of his father and of his
brothers, William and Leander, he began the manufacture of the machine
in the primitive workshop at Walnut Grove, turning out less than fifty
machines a year, all of them made under great disadvantages. The
sickles were made forty miles away, and as there were no railroads in
those days, the blades, six feet long, had to be carried on horseback.
Neither was it easy, when once the machines were made, to get them to
market. The first consignment sent to the Western prairies, in 1844, was
taken in wagons from Walnut Grove to Scottsville, then down the canal to
Richmond, Va.; thence by water to New Orleans, and then up the
Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Cincinnati.
The great West, with its vast prairies, was the natural market for the
reaper. Upon the small farms of the East hand labor might still suffice
for the harvest; in the West, where the farms were enormous and labor
scarce, it was out of the question. Realizing that while his reaper was
a luxury in Virginia, it was a necessity in Ohio and Illinois, Cyrus
McCormick went to Cincinnati in the autumn of 1844 and began
manufacturing. At the same time he made some valuable improvements and
obtained a second patent. The reaper had become known and the inventor
rode on horseback through Illinois and Wisconsin, obtaining farmers'
orders for reapers, which he offered to A.C. Brown, of Cincinnati, as
security for payment, if he would use his workshops for manufacturing
them. McCormick was enabled also to arrange with a firm in Brockport,
N.Y., to make his reapers on a royalty, and this business provided the
great wheat district of Central New York with machines. In 1847 and 1848
he obtained still other patents for new features of the reaper.
[Illustration: The First Reaper.]
In 1846 he had already fixed upon Chicago as the best centre of
operations for the reaper business, and at the close of the year he
moved there. The next year the sale of the reapers rose to seven
hundred, and more than doubled in 1849. Having associated his two
brothers, William S. and Leander J., with him, Cyrus McCormick found
time to devote himself to introducing the reaper in the Old World. The
American exhibit at the London World's Fair of 1851 was rather a small
one, redeemed largely by the McCormick reaper, which the London _Times_,
as I have already said, praised as worth to the farmers of Great Britain
more than the whole cost of the exhibition. To it was awarded the grand
prize, known as the council medal.
The reaper's advance in public favor was as steady on the other side of
the water as here, and medals and honors were awarded McCormick at many
important exhibitions. During the Paris Exposition of 1867 McCormick
superintended the work of his reapers at a field trial held by the
exposition authorities, and so conclusively defeated all competitors
that Napoleon III., who walked after the reapers, expressed his
determination to confer upon the inventor, then and there, the Cross of
the Legion of Honor. At the French Exposition of 1878 the McCormick
wire-binder won the grand prize. From 1850 the success of the reaper was
assured. Mr. McCormick might have rested content with what had been
achieved, but it was not his nature. He not only continued to bear upon
his shoulders the larger share of responsibility of the rapidly growing
business, but he labored persistently to add to the effectiveness of his
invention.
The great fire that swept Chicago in 1871 left nothing of the already
important works established by Mr. McCormick. But, as might be expected
from such a man, he was a tower of strength to the city in her time of
distress, and one of those to rally first from the blow and to inspire
hope. Within a year, assisted by his brother Leander, he had raised from
the ashes an immense establishment, which with the growth of the last
few years now covers forty acres of ground. More than 2,000 men are here
employed. The statistics for last year show that more than 20,000 tons
of special bar-iron and steel, 2,800 tons of sheet steel, and 26,000
tons of castings were used in making the 142,000 machines sold. Ten
million feet of lumber were used, chiefly in boxing and crating, as very
little wood is now used in the reaper.
This is a marvellous development from the little Virginia shop of 1840,
with its output of one machine a week, and the growth means far more for
the country at large than might be inferred from these figures; the
farmers of the world owe more to the McCormick reaper than they can
repay. The whir of the American reaper is heard around the world. In
Egypt, Russia, India, Australia the machine is helping man with more
than a giant's strength. Recent American travellers through Persia have
described the singular effect produced upon them by seeing the McCormick
reaper doing its steady work in the fields over which Haroun Al Raschid
may have roamed. And this wonderful machine is followed with awe by the
more ignorant of the natives, who look upon its achievements as little
short of magical. They are not far wrong, however, for it is more
amazing than any wonder described in their "Arabian Nights."
The last years of Cyrus H. McCormick's life were such as have fallen to
few of the world's benefactors, for as a rule the pioneer who shows the
road has a hard time of it, even unto the end. Mr. McCormick had the
satisfaction of knowing not only that by his invention he had conferred
a blessing upon the workmen of the world, but that the world had
acknowledged the debt. Material prosperity, however, was not considered
any reason for luxurious idleness. To the close of his life Mr.
McCormick continued to supervise the business of his firm and to make
the reaper more perfect. No great exhibition abroad or in this country
passed without some of its honors falling to the share of the McCormick
reaper.
The private life of Cyrus H. McCormick was a happy one, and to this may
be attributed no small share of the elasticity and courage that
recognized no defeat as final. Congress failed to do him justice; his
business was attacked by hordes of rivals; it was interrupted by the
fire of 1871 and afterward threatened by labor strikes incited by
self-seeking demagogues. Hard work was the rule of his life and not the
exception. But that his nature remained sweet and just is shown by his
untiring work upon behalf of others. His home life, as I have just
remarked, was unusually blessed. In 1858 he married Miss Nettie Fowler,
a daughter of Melzar Fowler, of Jefferson County, New York. Of the seven
children born of this marriage, five lived to grow up, his son, Cyrus H.
McCormick, now occupying his father's place at the head of the great
works in Chicago. One of the daughters, Anita, is the widow of Emmons
Blaine. The inventor of the reaping-machine died on the 13th of May,
1884. Robert H. Parkinson, of Cincinnati, speaks as follows of one of
the last interviews he had with Mr. McCormick: "Though struggling with
the infirmities of age, he took on a kind of majesty which belongs alone
to that combination of great mental and moral strength, and he surprised
me by the power with which he grappled the matters under discussion, and
the strong personality before which obstacles went down as swiftly and
inevitably as grain before the knife of his machine. I think myself
fortunate in having had this glimpse of him and in being able to
remember with so much personal association a life so complete in its
achievements, so far-reaching in its impress, alike upon the material,
moral, and religious progress of the country, and so thoroughly
successful and beneficial in every department of activity and influence
which it entered." One of his friends, speaking of Mr. McCormick, said:
"That which gave intensity to his purpose, strength to his will, and
nerved him with perseverance that never failed was his supreme regard
for justice, his worshipful reverence for the true and right. The
thoroughness of his conviction that justice must be done, that right
must be maintained, made him insensible to reproach and impatient of
delay. I do not wonder that his character was strong, nor that his
purpose was invincible, nor that his plans were crowned with an ultimate
and signal success, for where conviction of right is the motive-power
and the attainment of justice the end in view, with faith in God there
is no such word as fail."
Cyrus H. McCormick was not only the inventor of a great labor-saving
device, but he helped his fellow-man in other ways. Philanthropy,
religion, education, journalism, and politics received a share of his
attention. More than thirty years ago he was already an active power for
good in the councils of his church. In 1859 he proposed to the General
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to endow with $100,000 the
professorships of a theological seminary, to be established in Chicago.
This was done, and during his lifetime he gave about half a million
dollars to this institution--the Theological Seminary of the Northwest.
The McCormick professorship of natural philosophy in the Washington and
Lee University of Virginia, and gifts to the Union Theological Seminary
at Hampden-Sidney, and to the college at Hastings, Neb., also attest his
solicitude for the church in which he had been reared and of which he
had been a member since 1834. In 1872 he came to the aid of the
struggling organ of the Presbyterian Church in the Northwest, the
_Interior_, and used it to foster union between the Old and the New
Schools in the church, to aid in harmonizing the Presbyterian Church in
the North and South, to advance the interests of the Theological
Seminary, and to promote the welfare of the Presbyterian Church in the
Northwest. Under his care and advice the _Interior_ grew to be a mighty
voice, expressing the convictions, the aspirations, and hopes of a great
church.
[Illustration: Thomas A. Edison.]
IX.
THOMAS A. EDISON.
[Illustration: Edison's Paper Carbon Lamp.]
Thomas A. Edison is sometimes spoken of rather as a master mechanic than
as a master inventor or discoverer, and with regard to some of his
work--I might even say most of it--this characterization holds true.
Edison's fame is chiefly associated in the popular mind with the
electric light. Yet it is perfectly well known to every student of the
matter, that in all that he has done toward making the electric light a
useful every-day--or perhaps I should say every-night--affair, he has
simply made practicable what other men had invented or discovered before
him. The fundamental discovery upon which the incandescent electric lamp
is founded--that a wire of metal or other substance if heated to
incandescence in a glass bulb from which the air has been exhausted will
give light for a longer or shorter time, according to the character of
the apparatus and the degree to which a perfect vacuum has been effected
in the bulb--this dates from the first half of the century. As early as
1849 Despretz, the French scientist, described a series of experiments
with sticks of carbon sealed in a glass globe from which air had been
exhausted. When a powerful current was passed through the carbon
filament it became luminous and remained so for a short time. This was,
perhaps, the first of a long line of similar experiments in which a
number of American physicists--Farmer, Draper, Henry, Morse, and Maxim
among them--took part. But notwithstanding the labors of a score of
experts in Europe and this country, the incandescent electric light--the
wire in a glass bulb exhausted of its air--remained a laboratory
curiosity up to the time, fifteen years ago, when Edison took hold of
it. It gave light only for a short time and was too expensive a toy for
practical use. The carbon burned out or disintegrated, and the lamp
failed. Edison took hold of the mechanical difficulties of the problem.
With a patience, an ingenuity, a fertility of device in which he stands
alone, he got to the bottom of each radical defect and remedied it. The
lamp would not burn long because the platinum wire used gave out, partly
because platinum was not fitted for the work, fusing at too low a
temperature. Edison substituted carbonized strips of paper. These in
turn failed, and he found a species of bamboo that answered. The lamp
would not burn because air still remained in the little bulbs
notwithstanding the most careful manipulation with Sprengel pumps to
exhaust the air. Edison invented new pumps and devices by which the
air, down to one millionth part, was excluded. The lamp cost too much to
operate, because large copper wires were needed to carry the current,
and the generators used up steam power too fast. Edison devised new
forms of conductors and generators. All such work called more for
mechanical ingenuity than for actual invention. No new principles were
involved--merely the better adaptation of known methods. Given a perfect
carbon, a globe perfectly free from air, cheap electric current, and
cheap means of carrying it from the generating machine to the lamps, and
the problem was solved.
Edison, as a master mechanic, furnished all this, or at least so nearly
solved the problem as to entitle him to claim credit for having given
the electric light to the world--a better illuminant than gas in every
way, and destined some day to be infinitely cheaper.
With regard to Edison's work upon the telegraph, telephone, electric
railway, dynamo, the ore-extracting machines, the electric pen, and a
score of other inventions which have made him the most profitable
customer of the United States Patent Office in this or any other
generation, the labor of this remarkable genius has also been largely
that of one who made practical and useful the dreams of others. And I am
by no means sure that the man who does this is not entitled to more
credit than he who simply suggests that such and such a wonder might be
accomplished and stops there. It is certain that before Edison we had
no electric lights; now we have them in every important building in the
country, and ere long shall have them everywhere.
Edison dislikes intensely the term discoverer as applied to himself.
"Discovery is not invention," he once remarked in the course of an
interesting talk with Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, printed in _Harper's
Magazine_. "A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident. A
man walks along the road intending to catch the train. On the way his
foot kicks against something, and looking down to see what he has hit,
he sees a gold bracelet embedded in the dust. He has discovered that,
certainly not invented it. He did not set out to find a bracelet, yet
the value of it is just as great to him at the moment as if, after long
years of study, he had invented a machine for making a gold bracelet out
of common road metal. Goodyear discovered the way to make hard rubber.
He was at work experimenting with india-rubber, and quite by chance he
hit upon a process which hardened it--the last result in the world that
he wished or expected to attain. In a discovery there must be an element
of the accidental, and an important one, too; while an invention is
purely deductive. In my own case but few, and those the least important,
of my inventions owed anything to accident. Most of them have been
hammered out after long and patient labor, and are the result of
countless experiments all directed toward attaining some well-defined
object. All mechanical improvements may safely be said to be inventions
and not discoveries. The sewing-machine was an invention. So were the
steam-engine and the typewriter. Speaking of this latter, did I ever
tell you that I made the first twelve typewriters at my old factory in
Railroad Avenue, Newark? This was in 1869 or 1870, and I myself had
worked at a machine of similar character, but never found time to
develop it fully."
[Illustration: Edison Listening to his Phonograph.]
There is one great invention, however, for which Edison deserves credit,
both as discoverer and practical inventor--the phonograph. Here was a
genuine discovery. The phonograph knows no other parent than Edison, and
he has brought it to its present condition by devotion and tireless
skill. I have always believed in the phonograph as an instrument
destined to play some day an important part among the blessings that
ingenuity has given to man. There are still obstacles in the way of its
practical success, but that the missing screw or spring--perhaps no more
than that--will be found in the near future, is not doubted by any
competent observer.
Thomas Alva Edison was born February 11, 1847, at Milan, Erie County,
O., an obscure canal village. When a small boy, his family, a most
humble one (his father being a village jack-of-all-trades, living upon
odd jobs done for neighboring farmers), moved to Port Huron, Mich.,
where Edison's boyhood was passed. There his father was in turn tailor,
well-digger, nursery-man, dealer in grain, lumber, and farm lands. His
parents were of Dutch-Scotch descent and gave him the iron constitution
that enables him to-day, at the age of forty-seven, to tire out the most
robust of his assistants. One of his ancestors lived to the age of one
hundred and two, and another to the age of one hundred and three, so
that we may reasonably expect the famous inventor to open the door for
us to still other wonders of which we do not yet even dream. His mother,
born in Massachusetts, had a good education and at one time taught
school in Canada. Of regular schooling, young Edison had but two months
in his life. Whatever else he knew as a boy he learned from his mother.
There are no records showing extraordinary promise on his part. He was
an omnivorous reader, having an intense curiosity about the world and
its great men. At ten years of age he was reading Hume's "England,"
Gibbon's "Rome," the Penny Encyclopædia, and some books on chemistry.
At the age of twelve he entered upon his life work as newsboy on the
Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada and the Michigan Central, selling papers,
books, candies, etc., to the passengers.
"Were you one of the train-boys," he was once asked, "who sold figs in
boxes with bottoms half an inch thick?"
"If I recollect aright," he replied, with a merry twinkle, "the bottoms
of my boxes were a good inch."
[Illustration: From Edison's Newspaper, the "Grand Trunk Herald."]
Perhaps the twelve-year-old boy learned something from the books and
papers he sold. At all events he says that the love of chemistry, even
at that age, led him to make the corner of the baggage-car where he
stored his wares a small laboratory, fitted up with such retorts and
bottles as he could pick up in the railroad workshops. He had a copy of
Fresenius's "Qualitative Analysis," into which he plunged with the ardor
a small boy usually shows for nothing literary unless it has a yellow
cover decorated with an Indian's head. He seems also to have had a habit
of "hanging around" all interesting places, from a machine-shop to a
printing-office, keeping his eyes very wide open. In one such expedition
he received as a gift from W.F. Storey, of the _Detroit Free Press_,
three hundred pounds of old type thrown out as useless. With an old
hand-press he began printing a paper of his own, the _Grand Trunk
Herald_, of which he sold several hundred copies a week, the employees
of the road being his best customers. "My news," he says, talking of
this time, "was purely local. But I was proud of my newspaper and looked
upon myself as a full-fledged newspaper man. My items used to run about
like this: 'John Robinson, baggage-master at James's Creek Station, fell
off the platform yesterday and hurt his leg. The boys are sorry for
John.' Or, 'No. 3 Burlington engine has gone into the shed for
repairs.'"
This was Edison's only dip into a literary occupation. He has no
predilection in that way. He realizes the value of newspapers and books,
but chiefly as tools, and his splendid library at the Orange laboratory,
kept with scrupulous system, is filled with scientific books and
periodicals only. Telegraphy was to be the field in which he was to win
his first laurels. Some years ago he told the story as follows:
"At the beginning of the civil war I was slaving late and early at
selling papers; but, to tell the truth, I was not making a fortune. I
worked on so small a margin that I had to be mighty careful not to
overload myself with papers that I could not sell. On the other hand, I
could not afford to carry so few that I should find myself sold out long
before the end of the trip. To enable myself to hit the happy mean, I
formed a plan which turned out admirably. I made a friend of one of the
compositors of the _Free Press_ office, and persuaded him to show me
every day a 'galley-proof' of the most important news article. From a
study of its head-lines I soon learned to gauge the value of the day's
news and its selling capacity, so that I could form a tolerably correct
estimate of the number of papers I should need. As a rule I could
dispose of about two hundred; but if there was any special news from the
seat of war, the sale ran up to three hundred or over. Well, one day my
compositor brought me a proof-slip of which nearly the whole was taken
up with a gigantic display head. It was the first report of the battle
of Pittsburgh Landing--afterward called Shiloh, you know--and it gave
the number of killed and wounded as sixty thousand men.
"I grasped the situation at once. Here was a chance for enormous sales,
if only the people along the line could know what had happened! If only
they could see the proof-slip I was then reading! Suddenly an idea
occurred to me. I rushed off to the telegraph-operator and gravely made
a proposition to him which he received just as gravely. He on his part
was to wire to each of the principal stations on our route, asking the
station-master to chalk up on the bulletin-board--used for announcing
the time of arrival and departure of trains--the news of the great
battle, with its accompanying slaughter. This he was to do at once,
while I, in return, agreed to supply him with current literature 'free,
gratis, for nothing' during the next six months from that date.