THE STORY OF DEERING
Fifty years ago two young farmers named Marsh were cutting grain near
DeKalb, Illinois. They were too intelligent--too American--to be fond of
work for work's sake. And of all their drudgery, the everlasting stooping
over bundles to bind them into sheaves galled them most. Such
back-breaking toil, they thought, might be well enough for kangaroos, but
it certainly was not suitable for an erect biped, like man.
"If I didn't have to walk from bundle to bundle, and hump myself like a
horseshoe, I could do twice as much work," said one of the brothers.
"Well," said the other, "why can't we fix a platform on the reaper, and
have the grain carried up to us?"
It was a brilliant idea and a new one. Neither of the young fellows had
ever seen a reaper factory; but they were handy and self-reliant. By the
next autumn they were in the field with their new machine, and as they had
expected, they bound the grain twice as quickly as they had the year
before.
So was born the famous Marsh harvester, which proved to be the half-way
mark in the evolution of the grain-reaping machine. It was the child of
the reaper and the parent of the self-binder. It cut in two the cost of
binding grain. But it did more than this--it gave the farmer his first
chance to stand erect, and forced him to be quick, for the two men who
stood on the harvester were compelled to bind the grain as fast as it was
cut. Thus it introduced the factory system, one might say, into the
harvest-field. For the first time the Big Minute made its appearance on
the farm.
The Marsh boys, never dreaming that they had helped to change the
destinies of nations, took out a flimsy patent on their invention, and
went on with their farm work. Two summers later, as they were at work with
it, their home-made harvester broke down. A farmer from Plano, near
DeKalb, named Lewis Steward, was riding by. He stopped, and, being a man
of unusual abilities and discernment, he at once saw the value of the
Marsh machine, even in its disabled state.
"Boys, you're on the right track," he said. "If you can run your machine
ten rods, it can be made to run ten miles. It is superior to anything now
in use."
Thus cheered, the Marsh brothers went to Plano, arranged a partnership
with a clever mechanic named John F. Hollister, and began to make
harvesters for sale. To their surprise the new machine was not welcomed.
It was received with an almost unanimous roar of disapproval. It was a
"man-killer," said the farmers. Now, the Marsh brothers were quick,
nervous men, and they had built a machine to suit themselves. But it was
undeniably too fast and nerve-racking for most farmers. The labourers
refused to work with it.
The Marshes overcame the obstacle in a very ingenious way. They put
_girls_ on their harvesters, instead of men. Not ordinary girls, to be
sure, but vigorous German maidens, who were swift and skilful binders.
Also, they had well-trained men, disguised as hoboes, who mingled in the
crowd around the harvester at times of demonstration, and volunteered to
get aboard of it. To see a girl or a "Weary Willie" binding grain on the
new machine shamed the labourers into a surrender, and in 1864 two dozen
of the Marsh harvesters were sold.
[Illustration: WILLIAM DEERING]
In this year one of the Marshes performed a feat that seemed more
appropriate for a circus than for a grain-field. Riding alone on a
harvester, he bound a whole acre of wheat in fifty-five minutes. Little
was heard of this amazing achievement at the time, as the national mind
was distraught over the death grapple of Grant and Lee in Virginia.
But there was one quick-eyed man in Chicago named Gammon who heard of the
event, and acted upon it so promptly that the goddess of prosperity picked
him out as one of her favourites. Several years before, Gammon had been a
Methodist preacher in Maine. A weak throat had brought his sermons to an
end, and he became a reaper salesman in Chicago. He was shrewd and honest,
and in 1864 his profits were very nearly forty thousand dollars.
When he heard that W. W. Marsh had bound an acre of grain in fifty-five
minutes, on a new-fangled reaper, he caught the next train for DeKalb,
and bought a licence to manufacture Marsh harvesters. He took in a
partner--J. D. Easter--and the business inched ahead slowly, until in 1870
the sales rose to a thousand. Easter and Gammon were driving their small
factory ahead at full speed. If they only could secure enough capital,
they would surprise the world.
One evening, while Gammon was worrying over this lack, he heard a gentle
knock at the door. He opened it to one of his old acquaintances from
Maine.
"Mr. Gammon," said the visitor, "I have about forty thousand dollars of
spare money that I would like to invest in Chicago real estate, and I want
your advice as to the best place to buy."
"What!" said Gammon, springing to his feet in delight. "Have you money to
invest? Give it to me and I'll pay you ten per cent. or make you a partner
in the best business in Illinois."
The visitor, whose name was William Deering, knew nothing whatever about
reapers nor wheat-fields. He had gained a fair-sized fortune in the
wholesale dry-goods business. But he was a Methodist and had confidence in
the ex-reverend E. H. Gammon; so he passed his $40,000 across the table
and the next day went home to Maine.
[Illustration: WILLIAM N. WHITELEY Photo by Baumgardner, Springfield, O.
C. W. MARSH
JOHN F. APPLEBY Photo by Rice, Milwaukee
E. H. GAMMON]
Two years later Deering came down to see how Gammon and the $40,000 were
faring. The books showed a profit of $80,000. So Deering requested that he
be made a partner. A year afterward Gammon fell sick and begged Deering to
come to Illinois and manage the business. Deering consented to be manager
for one year only; but Gammon's sickness continued.
"So," said William Deering, who told me this story, "in that way I got
into the harvester business and had to stay in. But I did not even know,
at that time, the appearance of our own machine."
Deering's competitors at first called him a greenhorn. But they forgot
that he was the only one among them who had been trained in the art of
business. He was already a veteran--a prize winner--in the game of
finance. For thirty years, ever since he began to earn $18 a month in his
father's woolen mills, he had been a man of affairs. He had, in fact,
established the wholesale dry-goods house of Deering, Milliken & Co.,
which still stands as one of the largest of its kind. This training was
all the more valuable an asset because of the conditions that prevailed
when Deering entered the harvester trade. For he arrived in that worst of
all years in the last century--1873. The Jay Cooke panic was at its
height. The proudest corporations were falling like grass before a mower.
It was a year of dread and paralysis. But Deering faced these
disadvantages with ability, with sheer, dogged persistence, and with
business training. In seven years he had become one of the greatest of the
harvester kings, and was leading them all up to a higher level.
We shall understand more clearly what this means if we consider the state
of the trade at the time of his entrance. A man of peaceable and kindly
inclinations, Deering was dragged into a business that was as turbulent as
a bull-fight. For as the reaper had evolved, it had become a bone of
contention, and it remained so from the first patent to the last. The
opening battle was fought by McCormick and Hussey, each claiming to have
been the Christopher Columbus of the business. After the gold-rush of 1849
new types of reapers sprang up on all sides. The crude machines that
merely cut the grain were driven out by others that automatically raked
the cut grain into bundles. These were soon followed by a combined reaper
and mower, which held the field until the Marsh harvester was invented, as
we have seen, at the close of the Civil War.
Among these different types of reapers, and the numerous variations of
each type, the bitterest rivalries prevailed. There was no pool, no
"gentlemen's agreement," no "community of interest." Indeed, the
"harvester business" was not business. It was a riotous game of "Farmer,
farmer, who gets the farmer?" The excited players cared less for the
profits than for the victories. As fast as they made money, they threw it
back into the game. Mechanics became millionaires, and millionaires became
mechanics. The whole trade was tense with risk and rivalry and excitement,
as though it were a search for gold along the high plateaus of the Rand.
And this in spite of the fact that, with the exception of McCormick,
Osborne, and Whiteley, the men who came to be known as reaper kings were
not naturally fighters. No business men were ever gentler than Deering,
Glessner, Warder, Adriance, and Huntley. But the making of reapers was a
new trade. It was like a vast, unfenced prairie, where every settler owned
as much ground as he could defend.
Each step ahead meant a struggle for patents. Whoever built a reaper had
to defend himself in the courts as well as approve himself in the
harvest-fields. Cyrus H. McCormick, especially, as William Deering soon
learned, wielded the Big Stick against every man who dared to make
reapers. He was the old veteran of the trade, and he gave battle to his
competitors as though they were a horde of trespassers. He was their
common enemy, and the reaper money that was squandered on lawsuits brought
a golden era of prosperity to the lawyers.
Some of these patent wars shook the country with the crash of hostile
forces. The tide of battle rolled up to the Supreme Court and even into
the halls of Congress. Once, in 1855 when McCormick charged full tilt upon
John H. Manny, who was making reapers at Rockford, Illinois, a three-year
struggle began that was the most noted legal duel of the day.
McCormick, to make sure of his victory, went into the fight with a battery
of lawyers whom he thought invincible--William H. Seward, E. M. Dickerson,
and Senator Reverdy Johnson. Manny made a giant effort at self-defence by
hiring Abraham Lincoln, Edwin M. Stanton, Stephen A. Douglas, Peter H.
Watson, George Harding, and Congressman H. Winter Davis.
From first to last it was a lawyers' battle, and McCormick was finally
defeated by Stanton, who made an unanswerably eloquent speech. For this
speech Stanton received $10,000, and Lincoln, who had made no speech at
all, was given $1,000. Yet, in the long run, the man who profited by this
lawsuit was Lincoln; for it was this money that enabled him to carry on
his famous debate with Douglas, and thus made him the inevitable candidate
of the Republican Party.
McCormick's most disastrous lawsuit was with D. M. Osborne and the Gordon
brothers, of Rochester. In 1875 the Gordons had invented an attachment
for a wire self-binder, and in a careless moment McCormick had signed a
contract promising to make these self-binders and to pay $10 royalty on
every machine. Then a man named Withington appeared with a much better
self-binder. McCormick at once began to make the Withington machine and
was sued by the Gordons.
At this time McCormick was over seventy years of age, and crippled with
rheumatism; but he believed that the Gordons had deceived him and he
fought them sternly as long as he lived. After his death, his eldest son,
Cyrus, consented to a compromise, whereby Osborne, who was owner of a
share in the Gordon concern, and the Gordons were to be paid $225,000. But
in order to impress upon them the enormity of this amount, he prepared the
money for them in small bills. When they called at the McCormick office in
Chicago, they were taken to a small room on the top floor and shown a
great pyramid of green currency.
"There is your money," said McCormick's lawyer. "Kindly count it and see
if it is not a quarter of a million dollars."
The three men gasped with mingled ecstasy and consternation. "B--b--but,"
stammered one of them, "how can we take it away? Can't you give us a
cheque?"
"That is the right amount, in legal money, gentlemen," replied the lawyer.
"All I will say is that there are a couple of old valises in the
closet--and I wish you good afternoon."
For several hours Osborne and the Gordons literally waded in affluence,
counting the money and packing it in the valises. By the time they had
finished, it was eight o'clock. The building was dark. The elevator was
not running. They were hungry and terrified. Step by step they groped
their trembling way downstairs, and staggered with their treasure through
the perilous streets to the Grand Pacific Hotel. None of them ever forgot
the terror of that night.
Another warlike Reaper King was "Bill" Whiteley, of Ohio. Whiteley had
invented a combined mower and reaper in 1858, which he named the
"Champion"; and he pushed this machine with an irresistible enthusiasm.
His mode of attack was not the patent suit, but the field test. This was
the white-hot climax of the rivalry among the reaper kings; and it was
great sport for the farmers. It was a reaper circus--a fierce chariot-race
in a wheat-field; and its influence upon the industry was remarkable. It
weeded out the low-grade machines. It spurred on the manufacturers to a
campaign of improvement. It developed American harvesters to the highest
point of perfection. It swung the farmers into the new path of scientific
agriculture. And it piled expenses so high that few of the reaper kings
escaped disaster.
A field test was conducted in this fashion: A committee of judges was
appointed, and several acres of ripe grain were selected as the
battle-field. After the field was marked off into equal sections, each
reaper took its place. There were sometimes two reapers and sometimes
forty. The signal was given. "Crack"--the horses leaped; the drivers
shouted; and hundreds of farmers surged up and down in excited crowds.
[Illustration: ASA S. BUSHNELL
BENJAMIN H. WARDER
HON. THOMAS MOTT OSBORNE
DAVID M. OSBORNE]
"All's fair in a field test," said the reaper agents who superintended
these contests; though each man said it to himself. They were a hardy and
reckless body of men, half cowboy, half mechanic, and no trick was too
dangerous or too desperate for them. Often the feud was so bitter that
bodyguards of big-fisted "bulldozers" were on the spot to protect the
warrior of their tribe who was in danger. "I had four men with me once who
together weighed 1,000 pounds," said A. E. Mayer, who is now the general
of an army of 40,000 salesmen. In most tests the machines were shamefully
abused. Self-binders were made to cut and bind stubble as though it were
grain. Mowers were driven full tilt against stumps and hop-poles. Rival
reapers were chained back to back and yanked apart by plunging horses. The
warrior agents exposed the weak points in each other's machines. They
photographed each other's breakdowns, and bragged to the limit of their
vocabularies. They raised prices in one town and cut them in the next; for
when their fighting blood was aroused--and that was often--they cared no
more for profits than a small boy cares for his clothes.
To give only one instance out of hundreds, here is a picture of a field
test that I found in the diary of B. B. Clarke, of Madison, who is now
the editor of the _American Thresherman_, but who was in the eighties a
harvester fighter in Indiana.
"We drove fourteen miles to the wheat-field, which was also the
battle-field," he wrote, "and found a heavy crop of rank grain, wild pea
vines, morning glories and other vegetation, which tested both machines to
the limit. The bundles were twisted together by the vines into almost a
continuous rope. After adjusting the machine, we had to 'open the field.'
This is considered the most severe test, as the machine, the horses and
all are in the grain.
"A---- drove the team, a magnificent pair of big grays. McK---- watched
the binder, while Y---- and I created sympathy for our cause among the
farmers who had come to see the fight. With a crack of his whip and a
shout to his team, A---- opened the ball. The machine was so crowded with
grain and weeds that the sickle could not be heard fifty feet away. He
cleared the first round without a stop. Then the other machine followed,
but the driver, failing to recognise the necessity of fast driving,
allowed his machine to clog, and lost the day. We received two hundred
dollars in gold on the spot for our victorious binder.
[Illustration: A SELF-BINDER IN SCOTLAND, WITH THE WALLACE MONUMENT IN THE
BACKGROUND]
"On returning to Fort Wayne we found the E---- people, whose headquarters
were separated by a partition wall from ours, had coaxed one of our
customers to cancel his order, and substitute their machine. For this act,
we retaliated and replaced three of their orders the following week, and
while loading these into the farmers' wagons a fight took place between
the opposing factions. I looked as though I had encountered a flax-hackle.
The next day hostilities opened early with three on our side to six of the
E---- host, requiring a riot alarm and a wagon-load of police to restore
order.
"We had swept the enemy before us, using neck-yokes, pitman rods and even
six shooters in the grand finale. Our expense account for that week
included fifty dollars for lawyers' fees, which was promptly O. K.'d by
the manager. After all, I had only obeyed instructions, which were to get
the business and hold up prices, 'peaceably if you can, but forcibly if
you must.'"
An interesting relic of these fierce days of cut-throat competition was
given to me by Mr. John F. Steward. It reads as follows:--
TO AGENTS FOR THE SALE OF HARVESTING MACHINERY:
The undersigned, manufacturers of harvesting machinery, call the
attention of their travelling experts and local agents to a practice
which has grown among them for a few years past, and which has become
so disreputable and is carried to such an extent that we feel it
necessary to bring it to your special notice. _It is the habit of
trying to break up sales made by other agents when you have not been
successful in securing the sale._ It has become a very common
practice, as soon as a sale is made by one agent, for the agents of
all other machines to try to break up that sale, by
misrepresentations or by lowering the price, or by trying to convince
the purchaser that the machine which he has bargained for is not as
good as the one which the other agent sells. This practice is
disreputable, and should not be tolerated by any manufacturer. We
wish it now thoroughly understood that we will not tolerate this
practice in any agent, and we will be glad to have reports from you
of the agents of any machines who have tried to break up your sales
of our machines in this way. There is nothing that tends more to
demoralise business than this practice, and we wish it stopped.
Machines should be sold upon their merits, and not by disparaging or
running down other machines. You will find that your customers will
place more reliance upon what you say if you leave all other machines
alone, and show the good features of your own and demonstrate them in
actual work. An agent never makes any progress by running down or
trying to show the defects of others, and you will be better able to
sustain your prices and the reputation of your machines by following
the course indicated above. Therefore, it is our wish that you should
hold to your prices firmly, present your machines in the very best
possible light, and use all honourable means for making a fair and
honest sale; but if you are unfortunate enough to lose your sale, and
some competitor gains it, don't be persuaded to put yours in the
field by the side of your competitor, or try in any way to break up
the sale; and do not, until the purchaser has discarded another
machine, offer to put one of ours in its place.
Of course we do not mean by this that you shall stand quietly by and
see other agents break up your sales, or if others habitually do this
that you shall not retaliate, but you must not be the first to
inaugurate this practice. We are always ready to meet fair and honest
competition.
We want our business conducted in a fair and honourable way, and not
descend to ways that are discreditable to us and to you. No one agent
can expect to sell all the machines that are wanted in his district,
for the poorest machine will have some friends, and, though he may
have the very best one, we do not expect he will make every one see
it. Let the purchaser take the risk. If he buys an inferior machine
he should take the consequences, as if he was deceived or mistaken in
his judgment in buying a horse. In such a case you would not think of
putting your horse in work the purchaser was doing, to show him yours
was the best, with the expectation that he would return the one he
had bought because it did not prove quite equal to yours in drawing a
load or in driving. If you would not in the case of a horse, why
should you, in the case of a mower, reaper, or self-binding
harvester? Our advice to you is:
1st. Hold firmly to your prices.
2d. Sell your own machine. Convince your purchaser that you have the
best machine made.
3d. Settle for the machine at time of delivery. A machine works much
better after being settled for.
4th. If you lose the sale do not try to break up the sale of your
competitor. It won't pay.
[Illustration: Signatures]
The king of the field test was William N. Whiteley. No other reaper king,
in any country, received as much renown from his personal exploits. He was
the Charlemagne of the harvest-field. He was as tall as a sapling and as
strong as a tree. As a professor in the great field school of agriculture,
he has never been surpassed. He could out-talk, outwork, and generally
outwit the men who were sent against him. He was a whole exhibition in
himself. "I've seen Bill Whiteley racin' his horses through the grain and
leanin' over with his long arms to pick the mice's nests from just in
front of the knife," said an old Ohio settler.
The feat that first made Whiteley famous was performed at Jamestown, Ohio,
in 1867. His competitor was doing as good work as he was; whereupon he
sprang from his seat, unhitched one horse, and finished his course with a
single, surprised steed pulling the heavy machine. His competitor followed
suit, and succeeded fully as well. This enraged Whiteley, who at that time
was as powerful as a young Hercules.
"I can pull my reaper myself," he shouted, turning his second horse loose,
and yoking his big shoulders into its harness. Such a thing had never
been done before, and has never been done since; but it is true that, in
the passion of the moment, Whiteley was filled with such strength that he
ran the reaper from one side of the field to the other, cutting a full
swath--a deed that, had he done it in ancient Greece, would have placed
him among the immortals. It was witnessed by five hundred farmers, and
fully reported in the press. One of the reporters, as it happened,
representing the _Cincinnati Commercial_, was a young Ohioan named
Whitelaw Reid, now the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James.
That ten minutes in a horse collar made $2,000,000 for Whiteley. His
antagonist, Benjamin H. Warder, was filled with admiration for Whiteley's
prowess, and at once proposed that they should quit fighting and work in
harmony.
"Give me the right to make your reaper and I'll pay you $5 apiece for all
I can sell," said Warder. "It's a bargain," responded Whiteley. And so
there arose the first consolidation in the harvester business.
Whiteley and Warder did not merge their companies; but they divided the
United States into three parts--one for Whiteley, one for his brother
Amos, who also made reapers in Springfield, and one for Warder. They
united in building a malleable iron foundry and a knife works, so that
they could use better materials at a lower cost. They made the first
handsome and shapely machines.
For twelve years this triple alliance led the way, and all others, even
the mighty McCormick and the sagacious Deering, had to follow. The
"Champion" reaper became the leading machine of the United States, and the
little town of Springfield, Ohio, was known as the "Reaper City." As many
as 160,000 reapers and mowers were sent out as a year's work. In all,
2,000,000 of Whiteley's "Champion" machines have been made in Springfield,
and have sold at a gain of $18,000,000.
As the millions came pouring in so fast, Whiteley's head was turned and he
began to run amuck. He cut loose from Warder and from his own partners,
Fassler and Kelly, opened war on the Knights of Labour, built the biggest
reaper factory in the world, became a railroad president, helped to
corner the Chicago wheat market, backed the "Strasburg Clock"--an absurd
self-binder that was as big as a pipe-organ--and came crashing down in a
failure that jarred the farming world from end to end.
Whiteley lost millions in this crash--and with comparative indifference.
It was never the profits that he fought for. At heart he was a sportsman
rather than a money-maker. He craved the excitement of the race itself
more than the prizes. To win--that was the ambition of his life. And he
did not shrink from spectacular methods to accomplish his ambition.
For instance, nothing less would satisfy him, when he exhibited at the
Philadelphia Centennial, than a quarter-sized reaper, made daintily of
rosewood and gold. This brought him so sudden a rush of orders from the
East that in one day of the following year he sent seventy loaded cars to
Baltimore. With flags flying and brass bands playing, these cars rolled
off, with orders to travel only by daylight. When they arrived in
Harrisburg, running in three sections, they caught the eye of a railroad
superintendent named McCrea--who is now, by the way, president of the
Pennsylvania Railroad. McCrea saw a chance to advertise his railway as
well as Whiteley's reapers, so he linked the seventy cars together into
one three-quarter-mile train, put his biggest engine at the front, and
sent the gaudy caravan on its way.
Whiteley never knew how to be commonplace, even in the smallest matters.
Wherever he went, his trail was marked by stories of his exploits and his
oddities. How he organised the famous "White Plug Hat Brigade" in the
Blaine campaign--how he made a twelve-hour speech to help "Mother" Stewart
close up the saloons of Springfield--how he found a Springfield farmer
using a McCormick reaper, gave him a Whiteley reaper in its place, and
flung the rival machine upon the junk-pile, as a sign that he was the
monarch of Ohio--how he gathered up a peck of pies after a field test
dinner, put them in a sack, and ate nothing but pies for half a week--such
is the sort of anecdotes that his life has added to the folklore of the
Western farmers.
Many a time his vaudeville tactics disgusted and enraged his fellow
manufacturers; but he was too big a factor to be ignored. Once, when a
number of reaper kings had met together to see if they could rescue their
business from its riot of rivalry, the chairman opened the discussion with
the question--"What ought we to do to improve the conditions of our
trade?" For a moment there was silence, and then John P. Adriance--as
mild-natured a man as ever lived--said blandly, "Kill Whiteley."
With daring originality Whiteley combined a tremendous physical vitality
and a brain that fairly effervesced with inventiveness. He probably holds
the record among the reaper-men for inventions, with 125 patents in his
name. And he would work twenty-four hours at a stretch, without a yawn.
One evening he asked a young machinist to remain in the factory and help
him fix a refractory reaper. After working till midnight Whiteley said:
"Well, Jim, I suppose you think you are tired. Go home and have a good
night's sleep, and come back here in three hours."
He dashed with fanatical energy into any undertaking that appealed to his
imagination. Once, when he had too much money, he bought control of a new
railway that ran through Ohio from Springfield to Jackson,--160 miles. He
wanted to know its real value, so, instead of asking the directors a few
questions, as other men would have done, Whiteley travelled over the
entire length of the railroad, _on foot_.
When I saw Whiteley, last June, he was time-worn and whitened. Since the
great failure, he has been in the harvester business only intermittently.
He has long outlived his Golden Age, but he is as busy as ever, with a new
scheme and a new factory. And he still wears the Scotch cap and long boots
that have been familiar at field tests for more than half a century.
Of the other Springfield men, Warder was unquestionably the ablest. "He
was the main wheel," said Whiteley. As a young man of twenty-seven he was
running a sawmill in Springfield when he first heard of the reaper. He was
so impressed with its possibilities that he offered the inventor $30,000
for a share in it.
"Young Warder is crazy," said Springfield people, for at that time $30,000
was a fortune and a reaper was a fad. But thirty-five years later, when
Warder had removed to Washington and become noted among its social
entertainers, his investment had multiplied itself very nearly two
hundredfold.
Warder had associated with him two partners, Asa S. Bushnell and J. J.
Glessner. Bushnell began earning his living in boyhood as a clerk at $5 a
month, and stumbled into a business career as a druggist. Then he became
Warder's understudy, and piled up twice as many millions as he could count
on his fingers. As a climax he rose higher in public life than any other
reaper king, by serving twice as the Governor of Ohio. As for J. J.
Glessner, he is still active, and one of the dozen solid pillars upon
which the International Harvester Company is built.
Such were the strong men whom William Deering faced when he came, without
a shred of experience, into the harvester world. He had no ancient
patent-rights, like McCormick. He could not outrace thirty competitors in
a wheat-field, like Whiteley and Jones and Adriance and Osborne. One way
was left open to him.
"I'll beat them," he said, "by making a better machine."
He set out upon such a search for improvements that, during the rest of
his life, inventors fluttered around him like moths around a candle. Until
1879, the best harvester was a self-binder that tied the sheaves with
wire. It was the invention of Sylvanus D. Locke, and had been developed to
its highest point of perfection by a farm-bred inventor named C. B.
Withington, who is still living in Wisconsin. The Withington machine was
pushed by McCormick with great energy, and fifty thousand were sold
between 1877 and 1885. It was a marvelously simple mechanism, consisting
mainly of two steel fingers that moved back and forth, and twisted a wire
band around each sheaf of grain. As a machine it was a complete success;
but the farmers disliked it.
"The wire will mix with the straw," they said, "and our horses and cattle
will be killed."
So, when Deering met John F. Appleby, a stocky mechanic who claimed to
have invented a twine self-binder, he at once set him to work upon fifty
of the new machines.
When Deering saw his first Appleby binder at work in a field of wheat, he
was enthralled. Here, at last, was the perfect harvester. Its strong
steel arms could flash a cord around a bundle of grain, tie a knot, cut
the cord, and fling off the sheaf, too quickly for the eye to follow. It
seemed magical.
"What am I to do?" asked the farmer who bought the first of these
machines, as he climbed upon the seat and prepared to cut his grain.
"Do!" exclaimed John Webster, the Deering mechanic. "Do nothing! DRIVE THE
HORSES."
The amazed farmer started the horses, drove around the field, and came
back swinging his hat and shouting like a lunatic--as well he might. For
in the trail of his harvester the sheaves lay bound, as though there were
some kindly genie hidden among its wheels.
Deering owned, at that time, not much more than a million dollars--the
gleanings of thirty-five industrious years. But he resolved to stake it
all upon this amazing machine. If he lost--he would be a poor man at
fifty-three. If he won--he would be the harvester king of the world.
"I'll move the factory to Chicago and make 3,000 of these Appleby
twine-binders at once," he said.
His partner, E. H. Gammon, held back, so the inflexible Deering bought him
out, and from that day he, like his greatest competitor, McCormick, ran a
one-man business.
"Did you hear the news about Deering?" gossiped his fellow manufacturers.
"Clean crazy on a twine-binder!"
And, far more discouraging, the magical self-binder itself suddenly became
ill-humored and refused to form its sheaves properly. It was no easy
exploit, as any one may see, to make the first 3,000 of such complex
machines. No other artificial mechanism must so combine strength and
delicacy. No piano nor Hoe press, for instance, is expected to operate
while it is being jerked over a rough field or along the steep slant of a
hill.
One day in the early spring of 1880, Deering and his chief
lieutenants--Steward and Dixon--were in a field of rye near Alton, trying
to coax the new harvester to do its work. All day long it was obstinate
and perverse, and the men were at their wits' end.
"Well, boys," said Deering, "if we can't do better than this, I'll lose
$1,000,000."
"Try one more day," said Steward. They went to their hotel, and as it
happened to be crowded, the three were placed in a large double room.
"Steward and Dixon were mad at me the next morning," said Deering, when he
told me of that critical occasion. "They had nothing at stake, yet they
had lain awake all night; while I was apparently about to lose my only
million, and had slept like a log."
That day a slight change was made, and the harvester became good-natured
and obedient. The whole 3,000 machines were sold, and created as much
excitement as 3,000 miracles. They swept away competitors like chaff. Of a
hundred manufacturers seventy-eight were winnowed out. Instead of losing
his fortune, Deering cleared at once about four hundred thousand dollars,
for profits were large in those experimental days. Better still, he became
an acknowledged leader of his class. He had taken the right line of
development, as McCormick had in 1831, and all others who could, choked
down their rage and followed--quick march!
The man who had found the right path was John F. Appleby. He was the
scout--the Kit Carson of the harvester business. It was he--the inspired
farm labourer of Wisconsin--who had hurled another great impossibility out
of the way of the world's farmers.
He did not of course originate the whole self-binder. But he put the parts
together in the right way and pushed ahead to success through a wilderness
of failure. There was a notable group of inventors in Rockford who did
much to put him on the right track. One of these, Marquis L. Gorham, was
the originator of the self-sizing device that regulates the size of the
bound sheaf. Another, named Jacob Behel, invented a knotter, whittling it
out of a branch of a cherry tree.
Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-errant of industry. He takes his
pay in adventure. He dislikes to travel with the crowd. When I saw him
first, in his Chicago workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-binders.
He was engaged on the task of perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes
will do as much for the South as his self-binder did for the West. And it
was with some difficulty that I could persuade him to disentangle the
story of the twine-binder from the various other romances of his life.
In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster doing chores on a farm for one
dollar a week. Even this rate of pay was too high to the mind of the
farmer who employed him; for he was always whittling and making toy
machinery, instead of minding his work.
One day, when Appleby was seventeen, he was binding grain after a reaper.
"How do you like the work, Jack?" asked the farmer.
"I don't like it," said Jack, "and what's more, I believe I can invent a
machine to tie these bundles."
"Ho! ho!" laughed the farmer. "You little fool, you can't invent
anything."
Twenty-five years later, when Appleby had made half a million by his
invention, and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis, he noticed an old
man pushing a wheelbarrow in the factory yard.
"Haven't I seen you before?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," replied the old man. "I was the farmer who gave you your first
job."
"Well," said Appleby, "you see I wasn't a little fool after all."
Appleby actually had set to work to invent a knotting-machine when he was
a farm-boy of seventeen, and had made his first model at that age--in
1858. A young school-teacher named Chester W. Houghton was the first man
who put money back of the boy's invention. He stood behind it to the
extent of fifty dollars, and then became alarmed at such a reckless
speculation, and quit. Had he been just a little more adventurous, and a
little more patient, every dollar of his investment would have fruited
into a thousand.
When the school-teacher deserted him, and wanted the fifty dollars back,
Appleby was discouraged. The models that had been made at a gun shop in
Palmyra, Wisconsin, drifted about. They were sold at auction on one
occasion for seventeen cents; and the buyer thought they were not worth
even that, for he made a present of them to Appleby. Then came the crash
of the Civil War. Appleby enlisted, and for four years forgot knotters and
thought only of guns.
Yet while he lay in the trenches at Vicksburg, he whittled out a new
device for rifles. After the war, a capitalist saw this device, gave him
$500 for it, and then, before Appleby's eyes, sold a half interest in it
for $7,000. This awakened Appleby to the value of inventions and made him
an inventor for life.
Once more he set to work on his long-neglected grain-binder, and in 1867
he drove his first completed machine into a field near Mazomanie,
Wisconsin. The horses were fractious, and after being jerked along for
several rods, the machine broke down, to the great delight of the
spectators, most of whom knew Appleby and regarded him as a crank. But the
machine had bound a couple of sheaves before it broke. Appleby displayed
these, and one man--Dr. E. D. Bishop--pulled a roll of money from his
pocket and handed it to the inventor.
"Take this," he said, "and make me a partner. Your invention will be a
world's wonder some day."
All told, Dr. Bishop staked $1,500 on Appleby's genius, for which, twelve
years later, he drew out $80,000. This was the first of the many
incidental fortunes scattered right and left in the path of the
self-binder, which began in 1880, to sweep forward as gloriously as the
triumphal car of a Roman emperor.
As for William Deering--the modest manufacturer from Maine, who in 1879
joined forces with Appleby, no sooner had he sold the 3,000 self-binders
than he found himself floundering neck deep in an unexpected sea of
troubles. There was not a flaw in the binders. They were cutting and tying
the grain with the skill of 60,000 men. But the twine-bill! Three thousand
farmers swore that it was too high.
Twine was an item that they had never in their lives bought in large
quantities. To pay fifty dollars--the price of a horse--for mere string
that was used once and then flung away, seemed outrageous. It was like
buying daily papers by the thousand, or shoe-laces by the ton. And so it
came about that though Deering had reduced the cost of wheat ten per
cent., he got little thanks for his superb machines--nothing but a loud
and angry roar for better and cheaper twine.
Deering moved against this new array of difficulties with quiet and
inexorable persistence. There were only three binder-twine makers in the
United States, and all warned him that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp.
But Deering pushed on until he met Edwin H. Fitler, afterward a mayor of
Philadelphia. From the unassuming way in which Deering stated his needs,
Fitler concluded that the order would be a small one.
"What you want," he said, "is a single strand twine, which cannot be made
without a new line of machinery. I regret to say that I cannot afford to
do this for one customer."
"Well," said Deering, "I think I may need a good deal in the long run,
though I wish to begin with not more than ten car-loads."
Ten car-loads! For a moment Fitler was dazed, but only for a moment. It
was his chance and he knew it. Years afterward, he was fond of telling how
he "made a million-dollar deal with William Deering in two minutes."
Thus, whatever Deering touched, he improved. He became the servant of the
harvester. He lavished fortunes upon it as sporting millionaires spent
fortunes on their horses. It was his one extravagance. In his later
endeavours to make the twine cheaper, he spent $15,000 on grass twine,
$35,000 on paper, $43,000 on straw, and failed. Then he spent $165,000 on
flax and succeeded. He was for thirty years a sort of paymaster to a small
mob of inventors who had new ideas or who thought they had. There was one
very able inventor--John Stone--who actually drew his salary and expenses
every week for twenty years, until he had perfected a corn-picking
machine. From first to last, Deering spent "perhaps more than two millions
of dollars" on improvements, according to one of his closest friends.
The fact is that the Appleby binder had transformed Deering from a man in
business simply to make money, into an enthusiast. While he remained as
careful of the business as ever, he began to enjoy the work itself more
than the profit. He would still fuss if he saw half a dozen nails in the
sweepings, or any other waste of pennies. But he poured the golden flood
of profits back into his factory with a recklessness that amazed his
friends. He pampered his beloved machines with roller bearings and bodies
of steel. He sent them to Europe and showed them to kings. Then, as his
enthusiasm grew, he looked ahead to the time when even the farm-horse
shall be set free from drudgery; and he began to build automobile mowers
and gasolene engines. In fact, he ripened, as he worked, into a seer who
saw far past the gain or loss of the present into the splendour of the
future.
[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, JR.
CHARLES DEERING Photo by Matzene, Chicago]
Sagacity--that is, perhaps, the one word that best explains William
Deering's success. He had an almost supernatural instinct, so his
competitors believed, which kept him in the right line of progress. There
seemed to be a business compass in his brain.
He was never a master of men, like McCormick, nor a good mixer among men,
like Whiteley; but as an organiser of men he was easily superior to them
both. He knew how to pit his managers one against another, as Carnegie
did; and how to develop a factory into a swift and automatic machine. He
was a statesman of commercialism. He piled up a big fortune, and earned
it.
It was his misfortune not to have been schooled on a farm, as were most of
the great reaper kings. McCormick, Whiteley, Lewis Miller, Morgan,
Johnson, Osborne, Sieberling, Jones, Esterley, and the Marshes were all
farm-bred. But Deering was shrewd enough to gather around him a corps of
men who had the experience that he lacked. At the head of this bodyguard
stood a farmer's son--John F. Steward. Such were the versatility and the
loyalty of Steward that he became Deering's Grand Vizier. He was
inventive, combative, literary, mechanical, litigious. It is now forty-two
years since Steward began to build harvesters; and he has ten dozen
patents to his credit.
So, what with the mature business experience of Deering himself, and the
skill and faithfulness of his captains, the little factory that he had
begun to manage in 1872 expanded in thirty years into one of the two
greatest harvester plants in the world, rolling out in every workday
minute two complete machines and thirty miles of twine.
Largely because of his enterprise the spectres of Famine are now beaten
back in fifty countries, yet there is not a word of self-praise in his
conversation.
"A man told me once that I was nothing more than a promoter," he said;
"and perhaps he was right. I wasn't an inventor, that's true. All I did
was to get the right men and tell them what I wanted them to do; so I
suppose I was just a promoter."
The few anecdotes that are told of him relate chiefly to his overmodesty.
Once, when he was travelling through Kansas with John Webster, one of his
trusty men, a big Westerner loomed up in front of him and said:
"Are you the Deering that makes the self-binders?"
"Yes," replied Deering, blushing as red as one of his own mowers.
"Well," said the Westerner, shaking him by the hand, "I want to say that
you're a mighty smart man."
Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and when the stranger had gone,
he leaned over to Webster and said:
"Think of him saying that I made the binders when I pay you fellows for
making them. I never felt so foolish in my life."
He is now eighty-one--older than our oldest railroad. In his lifetime he
has seen his country grow seven times in population and twenty-four times
in wealth.
He and his fellows have undeniably doubled the food supply of the world.
More--they said, "Presto, change!" and the drudges of the harvest-fields
stood up and became men. They have made life easier and nobler for untold
myriads of people, and have led the way to the brightest era of peace and
plenty that the hunger-bitten human race has ever known.
Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can
stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads.
And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie
or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.
The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester
business once--and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the
famous "Binder-Twine Trust" set out with the black flag flying. It was a
skyrocket enterprise. James R. Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This was
the first and only "easy money" that was ever made in the harvester world.
Then the farmers and the reaper kings rose up together and smote the Trust
in twenty legislatures. Its stock became waste paper; and in the
financial hurricane of 1893, it was the first victim.
No other business shows so tragic a death roll. For fifty years its trail
was marked by wreckage and disaster. Most of the few who succeeded at
first, failed later. Out of every ten who plunged into the scrimmage, nine
crawled out whipped or terrified.
And so the Romance of the Reaper was for fifty years a tragedy of
competition. _Out of more than two hundred harvester companies, only
fourteen survived in 1902; and these realised that if such waste and
warfare continued, their business would be destroyed._