SIXTEEN YEARS OF PIONEERING
In 1831 Cyrus McCormick had his Reaper, but the great world knew nothing
of it. None of the 850 papers that were being printed at this time in
the United States had given the notice of its birth. There was the young
inventor, with the one machine that the human race most needed, in a
remote cleft of the Virginian mountains, four days' journey from
Richmond, and wholly without any experience or money or influence that
would enable him to announce what he had done.
He had such a problem to solve as no inventor of to-day or to-morrow can
have. He was not living, as we are, in an age of faith and
optimism--when every new invention is welcomed with a shout of joy. He
confronted a sceptical and slow-moving little world, so different from
that of to-day that it requires a few lines of portrayal.
In general, it was a non-inventive and hand-labor world. There were few
factories, except for the weaving of cotton and woollen cloth. There
was no sewing-machine, nor Bessemer converter, nor Hoe press, nor
telegraph, nor photography. It was still the age of the tallow candle
and stage-coach and tinder-box. Practically no such thing was known as
farm machinery. Jethro Wood had invented his iron plow, but he was at
this time dying in poverty, never having been able to persuade farmers
to abandon their plows of wood. As for steel plows, no one in any
country had conceived of such a thing. James Oliver was a bare-footed
school-boy in Scotland and John Deere was a young blacksmith in Vermont.
Plows were pulled by oxen and horses, not by slaves, as in certain
regions of Asia; but almost every other sort of farm work was done by
hand.
Railways were few and of little account. Eighty-two miles of flimsy
track had been built in the United States; the Baltimore and Ohio was
making a solemn experiment with locomotives, horses, and _sails_, to
ascertain which one of these three was the best method of propulsion.
The first really successful American locomotive was put on the rails in
this year; and Professor Joseph Henry set up his trial telegraph wire
and gave the electric current its first lesson in obedience.
There was no free library in the world in 1831. The first one was
started in Peterborough, N. H., two years later. In England, electoral
reform had not begun, a General Fast had been ordered because of the
prevalence of cholera, and a four-pound loaf cost more than the day's
pay of a laborer. The United States was a twenty-four-State republic,
with very little knowledge of two-thirds of its own territory. The
source of the Mississippi River, for instance, was unknown. To send a
letter from Boston to New York cost the price of half a bushel of wheat.
There was no newspaper in Wisconsin and no house in Iowa. The first sale
of lots was announced in Chicago, but there was then no public building
in that hamlet, nothing but a few log cabins in a swampy waste that was
populous only in wild ducks, bears, and wolves. Forty of the latter were
shot by the villagers in 1834.
[Illustration: REAPING WITH CRUDE KNIVES IN INDIA]
Of the many eminent men who had the same birth-year as McCormick, Poe
and Mendelssohn had begun to be known as men of genius in 1831. But
Lincoln was then "a sort of clerk" in a village store. Darwin was
setting out on H. M. S. _Beagle_ upon his first voyage as a naturalist.
Gladstone was a student at Oxford. Proudhon was working at the case as a
poor printer. Oliver Wendell Holmes was somewhat aimlessly studying law.
Chopin was on his way to Paris. Tennyson had left college, without a
degree, to devote his life to the service of poetry. Three great men who
had been born earlier, Garrison, Whittier, and Mazzini, began their
life-work in 1831. And science was a babe in the cradle. Herbert
Spencer, Virchow and Pasteur were learning the multiplication table.
Huxley was six and Bertheiot four.
There was no Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, California, nor
Texas. Virginia was the main wheat State. Local famines were of
yearly occurrence. The period between 1816 and 1820 had been
one of severe depression and was bitterly referred to as the
"1800-and-starve-to-death" period. Seventy-five thousand people had
been imprisoned for debt in New York in a single year, and a
workingmen's party had sprung up as a protest against such intolerable
conditions. Even as late as 1837 there was a bread riot in the city of
New York. Five thousand hungry rioters broke into the warehouse of Eli
Hart & Company, and destroyed a great quantity of flour and wheat. Five
hundred barrels of flour were thrown from the windows; and women and
children gathered it up greedily from the dirty gutter where it fell.
So the world that confronted Cyrus McCormick was not a friendly world of
science and invention and prosperity. It was slow and dull and largely
hostile to whoever would teach it a better way of working. And we shall
now see by what means McCormick compelled it to accept his Reaper, and
to give him the credit and pay for his invention.
He was resolved from the first not to be robbed and flung aside as most
inventors had been. Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, had said in
1812: "The whole amount I have received is not equal to the value of the
labor saved in one hour by my machines now in use." Fulton had died at
fifty, plagued and plundered by imitators. Kay, Jacquard, Heathcoat, and
Hargreaves, inventors of weaving machinery, were mobbed. Arkwright's
mill was burned by incendiaries. Gutenberg, Cort, and Jethro Wood lost
their fortunes. Palissy was thrown into the Bastile. And Goodyear, who
gave us rubber, Bottgher, who gave us Sèvres porcelain, and Sauvage, who
gave us the screw propeller, died in poverty and neglect.
But Cyrus McCormick was more than an inventor. He was a
business-builder. In the same resolute, deliberate way in which he had
made his Reaper, he now set to work to make a business. He planned and
figured and made experiments. "His whole soul was wrapped up in his
Reaper," said one of the neighbors. Once while riding home on horseback
in the Summer of 1832, his horse stopped to drink in the centre of a
stream, and as he looked out upon the fields of yellow grain, shimmering
in the sunlight, the dazzling thought flashed upon his brain, "Perhaps I
may make a million dollars from this Reaper." As he said in a letter
written in later years: "This thought was so enormous that it seemed
like a dream-like dwelling in the clouds--so remote, so unattainable, so
exalted, so visionary."
His first step was seemingly a mistake, though it must have contributed
much toward the development of self-reliance and hardihood in his own
character. He received a tract of land from his father, and proceeded
with might and main to farm it alone. There was a small log house on his
land, and here he lived with two aged negro servants and his Reaper.
He needed money to buy iron--to advertise--to appoint agents. And he had
no means of earning money except by farming.
It is very evident that he had not set aside his purpose to make
Reapers, for we find in the _Lexington Union_ of September 28, 1833, the
first advertisement of his machine. He offers Reapers for sale at $50.00
apiece, and gives four testimonials from farmers. But nothing came of
this advertisement. No farmer came forward to buy. The four men who had
given testimonials had only seen the Reaper at work. They were not
purchasers. McCormick was "a voice crying in the wilderness" for _nine
years_ before he found a farmer who had the money and the courage to buy
one of his Reapers.
After living for more than a year on his farm, McCormick saw that as a
means of raising money it was a failure. It had given him a most
valuable period of preparatory solitude, but it had not helped him to
launch the Reaper; so he looked about him for some enterprise that would
yield a larger profit. There was a large deposit of iron ore near by,
and he resolved to build a furnace and make iron. Iron was the most
expensive item in the making of a reaper. At that time it was $50.00 a
ton--two and a half cents a pound. So as he had been unable to establish
the Reaper business with a farm, he now set out to do it with a furnace.
He persuaded his father and the school teacher to become his partners;
and they built the furnace and were making their first iron in
1835--the same year, by the way, in which a babe named Andrew Carnegie
was born in the little Scotch town of Dunfermline.
[Illustration: REAPING WITH SICKLES IN ALGERIA]
For several years the furnace did fairly well. It swallowed the ore and
charcoal and limestone, and poured into the channelled sand little
sputtering streams of fiery metal. Cyrus made the patterns for the
moulds, and, because of his great strength, did much of the heaviest
labor. But the work was so incessant that he had no time to build
Reapers. And in 1839, when the effects of the 1837 panic were felt in
the more remote regions of Virginia, Cyrus McCormick realized to the
full the aptness of that couplet of Hudibras--
"Ah, me, the perils that environ
The man who meddles with cold iron!"
The price of iron fell; debtors were unable to pay; the school teacher
signed over his property to his mother; and the whole burden of the
inevitable bankruptcy fell upon the McCormicks. Cyrus gave up his farm
to the creditors, and whatever other property he had that was saleable.
He did not give up the Reaper, and nobody would have taken it if he
had. Thus far, he had made no progress towards the building of a Reaper
business. Instead of being the owner of a million, or any part of a
million, he was eight years older than when he had begun to seek his
fortune, and penniless.
In this hour of debt and defeat Cyrus became the leader of the family.
Here for the first time he showed that indomitable spirit which was,
more than any other one thing, the secret of his success. At once he did
what he had not felt was possible before--he began to make Reapers.
Without money, without credit, without customers, he founded the first
of the world's reaper factories in the little log workshop near his
father's house. In the year of the iron failure, 1839, he gave a public
exhibition on the farm of Joshua Smith, near the town of Staunton. With
two men and a team of horses he cut two acres of wheat an hour. At this
there was great applause, but no buyers.
The farmers of that day were not accustomed to the use of machinery.
Their farm tools, for the most part, were so simple as to be made
either by themselves or by the village blacksmith. That the Reaper did
the work of ten men, they could not deny. But it was driven by an
expert. "It's all very wonderful, but I'm running a farm, not a circus,"
thought the average spectator at these exhibitions. Also, there was in
all Eastern States at that time a surplus of labor and a scarcity of
money, both of which tended to retard the adoption of the Reaper.
Neither did the business men of Staunton pay any serious attention to
it. There was a Samson Eager at that time who made wagons, a David
Gilkerson who made furniture, a Jacob Kurtz who made spinning wheels,
and an Absalom Brooks who made harness. But none of these men saw any
fortune in the making of Reapers, and Staunton lost its great
opportunity to be a manufacturing centre.
Failure was being heaped on failure, yet Cyrus McCormick hung to his
Reaper as John Knox had to his Bible. He went back to the little log
workshop with a fighting hope in his heart, and hammered away to make a
still better machine.
This was the darkest period in the history of the McCormicks--from 1837
to 1840. Once a constable named John Newton rode up to the farm-house
door with a summons, calling Cyrus and his father before the County
Judge on account of a debt of $19.01. A teamster named John Brains had
brought suit. His bill had been $72.00 and he had been paid more than
three-fourths of the money. But the constable was so impressed with the
honesty and industry of the McCormicks, that he rode back to town
without having served the summons. A little later, Mr. John Brains
received his money; and it may be said that had he accepted, instead, a
five per cent interest in the Reaper, he would have become in twenty
years or less one of the richest men in the county.
As it happened, not one of Cyrus McCormick's creditors thought of such
an idea as seizing the Reaper, or the patent, which had been secured in
1834. If the queer-looking machine, which was regarded as part marvel
and part freak, had been put up to auction in that neighborhood of
farmers, very likely it would have found no bidders. There appeared to
be one man only, a William Massie, who appreciated the ability of Cyrus
McCormick and lent him sums of money on various urgent occasions.
But in 1840 a stranger rode from the north and drew rein in front of the
little log workshop. In appearance he was a rough-looking man, but to
Cyrus he was an angel of light. He had come to buy a Reaper. He had been
one of the spectators at the Staunton exhibition, and he had resolved to
risk $50 on one of the new machines. His name, which deserves to be
recorded in the annals of the Reaper, was Abraham Smith.
[Illustration: REAPING WITH CRADLES IN ILLINOIS]
Several weeks later came two other angels in disguise--farmers who had
heard of the Reaper and who had ridden from their homes on the James
River, a forty-mile journey on horseback through the Blue Ridge
Mountains. These men had never seen a Reaper, but they had faith.
They were notable men. Both ordered machines, and Cyrus McCormick
accepted one of the orders only, as he was not satisfied with the way
his Reaper worked in grain that was wet. It was apt to clog in the
grooves that held the blade. Even in this darkest and most debt-ridden
period of his life, McCormick was much more intent, apparently, upon
making his Reapers work well than upon winning a fortune.
Almost breathlessly, the young inventor waited for the next harvest.
This was the unique difficulty of his task, that he had only a few weeks
once a year to try out his machine and to improve it. He had now sold
two, so that there were three Reapers clicking through the grain-fields
in the Summer of 1840. They failed to operate evenly. Where the grain
was dry, they cut well; but where it was damp, they clogged and at times
refused to cut at all.
Wet grain! This, after nine years of arduous labor, still remained a
stubborn obstacle to the success of the Reaper. It was especially hard
to overcome, because in that primitive neighborhood McCormick could not
secure the best workmanship in the making of the cutting-blade. However,
this obstacle did not daunt him. He gave his blade a more serrated edge,
and to his delight it cut down the wet grain very nearly as neatly as
the dry.
This success had cost him another year, for he sold no machines in 1841.
But he had now, at least, a wholly satisfactory Reaper. Fortified with a
testimonial from Abraham Smith, he fixed the price at $100 and became a
salesman. By great persistence he sold seven Reapers in 1842,
twenty-nine in 1843, and fifty in 1844. At last, after thirteen years of
struggle and defeat, Cyrus McCormick had succeeded; and the home farm
was transformed into a busy and triumphant Reaper factory.
There were new obstacles, of course. A few buyers failed to pay. Four
machines were held on loitering canal-boats until they were too late for
the harvest. There was strong opposition in several places by day
laborers. A trusted workman who was sent out to collect $300 ran away
with both horse and money. But none of these trifles moved the
victorious McCormick. The great stubborn world was about to surrender,
and he knew it.
By 1844 he had done more than sell machines. He had made converts. One
enthusiastic farmer named James M. Hite, who had made a world's record
in 1843 by cutting 175 acres of wheat in less than eight days, was the
first of these apostles of the Reaper. "My Reaper has more than paid for
itself in one harvest," he said; and he gave $1,333 for the right to
sell Reapers in eight counties. Closely after this man came Colonel
Tutwiler, who agreed to pay $2,500 for the right to sell in southern
Virginia. And a manufacturer in Richmond, J. Parker, bought an agency in
five counties for $500; and won the renown of being the first business
man who appreciated the Reaper. All this money was not paid in at once.
Some of it was never paid. But after thirteen years of struggle and
debt, this was Big Business.
Best of all, orders for seven Reapers had come from the West. Two
farmers in Tennessee and one each in Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa,
Illinois, and Ohio, had written to McCormick for "Virginia Reapers," as
they were called in the farm papers of that day. These seven letters, as
may be imagined, brought great joy and satisfaction to the McCormick
family, which was now, under the leadership of Cyrus, devoting its best
energies to the making of Reapers. The Reapers were made and then, when
the question of their transportation arose, Cyrus for the first time saw
clearly that the Virginia farm was not the best site for a factory. To
get the seven Reapers to the West, they had first to be carried in
wagons to Scottsville, then by canal to Richmond, re-shipped down the
James River to the Atlantic Ocean and around Florida to New Orleans,
transferred here to a river boat that went up the Mississippi and Ohio
Rivers to Cincinnati, and from Cincinnati in various directions to the
expectant farmers. Four of these Reapers arrived too late for the
harvest of 1844, and two of them were not paid for. Clearly, something
must be done to supply the Western farmers more efficiently.
[Illustration: AN EARLY ADVERTISEMENT FOR McCORMICK'S PATENT VIRGINIA
REAPER]
At this time a friend said to him, "Cyrus, why don't you go West with
your Reaper, where the land is level and labor is scarce?" His mind was
ripe for this idea. It was the call of the West. So one morning he put
$300 into his belt and set off on a 3,000-mile journey to establish the
empire of the Reaper. Up through Pennsylvania he rode by stage to Lake
Ontario, then westward through Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin,
Iowa, and Missouri.
For the first time he saw the _prairies_. So vast, so flat, so fertile,
these boundless plains amazed him. And he was quick to see that this
great land ocean was the natural home of the Reaper. Virginia might, but
the West _must_, accept his new machine.
Already the West was in desperate need of a quicker way to cut grain. As
McCormick rode through Illinois, he saw the most convincing argument in
favor of his Reaper. He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe
wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given
Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more
than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to
save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by
night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the
grain crop is this--it must be gathered quickly or it breaks down and
decays. It will not wait. The harvest season lasts from four to ten days
only. And whoever cannot snatch his grain from the field during this
short period must lose it.
Truly, the West needed the Reaper; and McCormick's first plan was to
overcome the transportation obstacle by selling licenses to many
manufacturers in many States. By 1846 he had, with herculean energy,
started Fitch & Company and Seymour, Morgan & Company in Brockport, N.
Y., Henry Bear in Missouri, Gray & Warner in Illinois, and A. C. Brown
in Cincinnati. These manufacturers, and the McCormick family in
Virginia, built 190 Reapers for the harvest of 1846. This was
multiplying the business by four, very nearly, but the plan was not
satisfactory. Some manufacturers used poor materials; some had unskilled
workmen; and one became so absorbed in new experiments that when the
harvest time arrived, his machines were not completed.
The new difficulty was not to get manufacturers to make Reapers, but to
get them to make _good_ Reapers. What was to be done? The thought of
having defective Reapers scattered among the farmers was intolerable to
Cyrus McCormick. He pondered deeply over the whole situation. He
considered the fact that the supremacy in wheat was slowly passing from
Virginia to Ohio. He took note of the railroads that were creeping
westward. He remembered the limitless prairies, far out in the sunset
country, that were still uncultivated. Plainly, he must make Reapers in
a factory of his own, so as to have them made well, and he must locate
that factory as near as possible to the prairies, at some point along
the Great Lakes. With the most painstaking diligence he studied the map
and finally he put his finger upon a town--a small new town, which bore
the strange name of _Chicago_.