THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER
Of all the varieties of difficulties that confronted Cyrus H. McCormick
during his strenuous life, the most baffling and disconcerting
difficulty was when his Reaper began to grow. For fifteen years--from
1845 to 1860--it had remained unchanged except that seats had been added
for the raker and the driver. It did no more than cut the grain and
leave it on the ground in loose bundles. It had abolished the sickler
and the cradler; but there yet remained the raker and the binder. Might
it not be possible, thought the restless American brain, to abolish
these also and leave no one but the driver?
This at once became a most popular and fascinating problem for
inventors. There was by this time everything to gain and nothing to lose
by improving the Reaper. There was no opposition and no ridicule. To cut
grain by horse-power had become, of course, the only proper way of
cutting it. As many as 20,000 Reapers of all kinds were made in 1860;
and McCormick's factory had grown to be the pride of Chicago. It was 90
by 150 feet in size, two stories high, and gave work to about a hundred
and twenty men.
As early as 1852 a fantastic self-rake Reaper had been invented by a
mechanical genius named Jearum Atkins. This man was a bed-ridden
cripple, who, to while away the tiresome hours of his confinement,
bought a McCormick Reaper, had it placed outside his window, and
actually devised an attachment to it which automatically raked off the
cut grain in bundles. It was a grotesque contrivance. The farmers
nicknamed it the "Iron Man." It consisted of an upright post, with two
revolving iron arms. These arms whirled stiffly around, windmill
fashion, and scraped the grain from the platform to the ground.
An amusing anecdote of this machine was told by Henry Wallace, known to
all farmers of the Middle West as the founder of _Wallace's Farmer_.
"The first Reaper that my father bought," said Mr. Wallace, "was a
McCormick machine that had an 'Iron Man' on it. The first day that it
was driven into the grain it made such a clatter that the horses ran
away. It was certainly a terrifying sight as it rattled through the
wheat, with its long, rake-fingered arms flying and hurling the cut
grain in the wildest disorder. It was as good as a chariot race in a
circus to the crowd of farmers, who had come to see how the new machine
would operate. The next day my father tried again. There had been rain
during the night, and the heavy machine stuck fast in the mud. It had
cost $300, but my father took the 'Iron Man' off, and during the
remainder of that harvest we raked off the grain by hand."
A great variety of self-rake Reapers soon appeared, and after 1860 the
farmers would buy no other kind. Thus a part of the problem had been
solved. The raker was abolished. There now remained the much more
difficult work of supplanting the binder--the man, or sometimes woman,
who gathered up the bundles of cut grain, and, making a crude rope of
the grain itself, bound it tightly around the middle, making what was
called a sheaf. This was hard, back-breaking work, intolerable when the
sun was hot, except to men of the strongest physique. It required not
strength only, but skill. Ninety-nine farmers out of a hundred believed
that it would always have to be done by hand. "How can it be possible,"
they asked, "that a machine which is being dragged by horses over a
rough field can at the same time be picking up grain and tying knots?"
Just then two young farmers near De Kalb came to the rescue by inventing
a new species of machine. It was neither a Reaper nor a self-binder. It
was half-way between the two. It was the missing link. It appeared that
an inventor named Mann had taken a McCormick Reaper and built a moving
platform upon it, in such a way that the grain was carried up to a wagon
which was drawn alongside. These two young farmers had bought a Mann
machine, and one of them, when he saw it in operation, originated a
brilliant idea.
"Why should the grain be carried up to a wagon?" he asked. "Why can't
we put a foot-board on the machine, for two of us to stand on, and then
bind the grain as fast as it is carried up?"
This was the origin of the "Marsh Harvester," which held the field for
ten years or longer. It did not abolish the man who bound, but it gave
him a chance to work twice as fast. It compelled him to be quick. It
saved him the trouble of walking from bundle to bundle. It enabled him
to stand erect. And best of all, it put half a dozen inventors on the
right line of thought. Plainly, what was needed now was to teach a Marsh
Harvester to tie knots.
One evening in 1874 a tall man, with a box under his arm, walked
diffidently up the steps of the McCormick home in Chicago, and rang the
bell. He asked to see Mr. McCormick, and was shown into the parlor,
where he found Mr. McCormick, sitting as usual in a large and
comfortable chair.
"My name is Withington," said the stranger. "I live in Janesville,
Wisconsin. I have here a model of a machine that will automatically
bind grain." Now, it so happened that McCormick had been kept awake
nearly the whole of the previous night by a stubborn business problem.
He could scarcely hold his eyelids apart. And when Withington was in the
midst of his explanation, with the intentness of a born inventor,
McCormick fell fast asleep.
At such a reception to his cherished machine, Withington lost heart. He
was a gentle, sensitive man, easily rebuffed, and so, when McCormick
aroused from his nap, Withington had departed and was on his way back to
Wisconsin. For a few seconds McCormick was uncertain as to whether his
visitor had been a reality or a dream. Then he awoke with a start into
instant action. A great opportunity had come to him and he had let it
slip. He was at this time making self-rake Reapers and Marsh Harvesters;
but what he wanted--what every Reaper manufacturer wanted in 1874--was a
self-binder. He at once called to him one of his trusted workmen.
"I want you to go to Janesville," he said. "Find a man named Withington,
and bring him to me by the first train that comes back to Chicago."
The next day Withington was brought back and treated with the utmost
courtesy. McCormick studied his invention and found it to be a most
remarkable mechanism. Two steel arms caught each bundle of grain,
whirled a wire tightly around it, fastened the two ends together with a
twist, cut it loose and tossed it to the ground. This self-binder was
perfect in all its details--as neat and effective a machine as could be
imagined. McCormick was delighted. At last, here was a machine that
would abolish the binding of grain by hand.
A bargain was made with Withington on the spot; and the following July a
self-binder was tried on the Sherwood farm, near Elgin, Illinois. It cut
fifty acres of wheat and bound every bundle without a slip. From this
time onwards no one was needed but a man, a boy, a girl, anybody, who
could hold the reins and drive a team of horses. Of the ten or twelve
sweating drudges who toiled in the harvest-field, all were now to be set
free--the sicklers, cradlers, rakers, binders--every one except the
driver, and he (or she) was to have the glory of riding on the triumphal
chariot of a machine that did all the work itself.
"There were ten men working in my wheat-field in the old days," said an
Illinois farmer. "But to-day our hired girl climbs upon the spring seat
of a self-binder and does the whole business."
McCormick was not the first to make one of these magical machines. There
was an able and enterprising manufacturer in New York State, Walter A.
Wood, who in 1873 had made three Withington binders, under the
supervision of Sylvanus D. Locke, who had been a co-worker with
Withington. McCormick had given Wood his start, as early as 1853, by
selling him a license to make Reapers; and Wood, by his high personal
qualities, had built up a most extensive business. But McCormick was the
first to make self-binders upon a large scale. He made 50,000 of the
Withington machines, and pushed them with irresistible energy.
[Illustration: THE FIRST McCORMICK SELF-RAKE REAPING MACHINE]
He originated a new method of advertising the self-binders among the
farmers. Special flat-cars were provided for him by the railroads. Upon
each one of these cars a binder was placed, in the charge of an expert.
These cars, during the harvest season, were attached to ordinary freight
trains; and whenever the train came to a busy wheat-field it was stopped
for an hour or more, the self-binder was rushed from the car to the
field, and an exhibition of its skill given to the wondering farmers.
Then it was put back on its car, and the train resumed its leisurely
course until it arrived at the next scene of harvesting.
The sensitive-natured inventor, Charles B. Withington, who gave such
timely aid to McCormick, was one of the most romantic knights-errant of
industry in his generation. Born near Akron a year before McCormick
invented his Reaper, he was trained by his father to be a watchmaker. At
fifteen, to earn some pocket-money, he went into the harvest field to
bind grain. He was not robust, and the hard, stooping labor under a hot
sun would sometimes bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage. There
were times after the day's work was done when he was too weary to walk
home, and would throw himself upon the stubble to rest.
At eighteen he set out to find his fortune in the far West, became a
Forty-niner, drifted to Australia, and in 1855 came back to Janesville,
Wisconsin, with three thousand dollars or more in his belt. All this
money he proceeded to fritter away on the invention of a self-rake
Reaper--"a crazy scheme," as the townspeople called it. As it happened,
the whole southern region of Wisconsin was being stirred up at that time
by the speeches of an inventive Madison editor, who went by the name of
"Pump" Carpenter. Carpenter's hobby was that the binding of grain must
be done by machinery. He was eloquent and popular, and his arguments
were substantiated by a little model which he was accustomed to carry
about with him. Withington heard him speak and was converted. He dropped
his self-rake reaper and went to work upon a self-binder. He completed
his first machine in 1872, and was thrust from one discouragement to
another until two years later he met McCormick.
It is a most interesting fact, and certainly not an accidental one, that
the group of noted inventors who together produced the self-binder all
appeared from the region south of Madison, which had been so aroused by
the eloquence of "Pump" Carpenter. Besides C. B. Withington, there were
Sylvanus D. Locke, also of Janesville, H. A. Holmes, of Beloit, John F.
Appleby, of Mazomanie, W. W. Burson, Jacob Behel, George H. Spaulding,
and Marquis L. Gorham, of Rockford.
Until 1880, all went well with McCormick and the Withington self-binder.
Apparently, the process of invention had ceased. The Reaper had become
of age. This miraculous wire-twisting machine was working everywhere
with clock-like precision, and was believed to be the best that human
ingenuity could devise. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky,
came the news that William Deering had made and sold 3,000 _twine_
self-binders, and that the farmers had all at once become prejudiced
against the use of wire. Wire, they said, got mixed with the straw and
killed their cattle. Wire fell in the wheat and made trouble in the
flour-mills. Wire cut their hands. Wire cluttered up their barn-yards.
They would have no more to do with wire. What they wanted and must have
was _twine_.
William Deering, the newcomer who had caused this disturbance, became in
a flash McCormick's ablest competitor. He had entered the business eight
years before with a running start, having been a successful dry goods
merchant in Maine. His geneology in the harvester industry shows that he
had become an active partner of E. H. Gammon in 1872. Gammon, who had
formerly been a Methodist preacher in Maine, had started as an agent for
Seymour and Morgan of Brockport, which firm had been licensed by
McCormick in 1845. Deering was the first highly skilled business man to
enter the harvester trade. He was not a farmer's son, like McCormick. He
was city-bred and factory trained. And in 1880 he staked practically his
whole fortune upon the making of 3,000 twine self-binders, and won.
Cyrus McCormick saw at a glance that the wire self-binder must go. It
was his policy to give the farmers what they wanted, rather than to
force upon them an unpopular machine. So he called to his aid a
mechanical genius named Marquis L. Gorham--one of those who had been
lured into the quest of a self-binder by the insistence of "Pump"
Carpenter. Gorham's most valuable contribution was a self-sizing device,
by which all bound sheaves were made to be the same size. By the time
that the grain stood ripe and yellow the following season, Gorham had
prepared a twine self-binder that worked well, and McCormick, yielding
to this sudden hostility against wire, pushed the Gorham machine with
the full force of his great organization.
This evolution of the Reaper into the twine self-binder was a momentous
event. It tremendously increased the sales. There were 60,000 machines
of all kinds sold in 1880, and 250,000 in 1885. And it strikingly
decreased the number of manufacturers. There were a hundred or more
until the appearance of the twine binder: and all but twenty-two fell
out of the race. Some of these were driven out by the expensive war of
patents that now ensued. But most of them gave up the contest for lack
of capital. The era of big production had arrived, and the little
hand-labor shops could not produce an intricate self-binder for the low
price at which they were being sold.
Even McCormick lost heavily at first, before a truce was called in this
battle of the binders. One lawsuit cost him more than $225,000 and one
experiment, with what was called a "low-down" binder, cost him $80,000.
He was as determined as ever not to be beaten; and although he was at
this time over seventy years of age, and sorely crippled by rheumatism,
he straightway entered into a trade war with Deering, which was not
ended until 1902. Many of the older workmen who are now employed in the
McCormick works can remember the stress and strain of those battling
years, and how their indomitable old leader, at times when he was
unable to walk, would have himself pushed in a wheeled chair through the
various buildings of his immense plant, to make sure that every part of
the great mechanism was working smoothly.
Of all the competitors who had fought him in the early days, before the
Civil War, there were few now remaining. Hussey, his first antagonist,
had sold out to a mowing machine syndicate in 1861. Emerson, Seymour,
and Morgan had decided not to make self-binders. Jerome Fassler, of
Springfield, Ohio, took his fortune of two million dollars and went to
New York City in 1882 with a scheme to build a subway. Manny was dead,
and very few were living of those who had seen the Reaper of 1831.
John P. Adriance, of Poughkeepsie, had survived. He was a gentle-natured
man, who was content with a small and safe percentage of the business.
Byron E. Huntley, of Batavia, had also built up a small, but solidly
based, enterprise. He had been the office-boy, in 1845, in the factory
where the first hundred McCormick Reapers were made; and he had been a
manufacturer on his own account since 1850. He, too, was a quiet,
dignified man, very highly esteemed in both the United States and
Europe. Lewis Miller, who deserves most credit as the creator of the
mower, continued to do business at Akron. Mr. Miller was almost equally
famous as a Methodist and the originator of the Chautauqua idea. At
Auburn, N. Y., David M. Osborne was fighting manfully to keep in the
race. He had built seven Reapers as early as 1856; and had made many
friends by his ability and uprightness. At Hoosick Falls, N. Y., there
was Walter A. Wood--a most competent and enterprising man; at Plano,
Illinois, there was William H. Jones--self-made and as honest as the
soil; and at Springfield, Ohio, were the picturesque William N. Whiteley
and the powerful company of Warder, Bushnell, and Glessner. Whiteley was
an inventor who had changed a McCormick Reaper into what he called a
"combined machine"--a combined Reaper and mower. And Warder, Bushnell,
and Glessner had begun to make McCormick Reapers, by means of a license
from Seymour and Morgan, in 1852.
[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1858]
Such were the most notable men who, together with McCormick and Deering,
began in 1880 or soon afterwards to manufacture the new knot-tying
device that had become necessary to the Reaper. As for Cyrus H.
McCormick himself, he lived to see it the universal grain-cutter of all
civilized countries. He lived to see it perfected into one of the most
astonishing mechanisms known to man--an almost rational machine that
cuts the grain, carries it on a canvas escalator up to steel hands that
shape it into bundles, tie a cord around it as neatly as could be done
by a sailor, and cut the cord; after which the bound sheaf is pushed
into a basket and held until five of them have been collected, whereupon
they are dropped carefully upon the ground.
Since 1884 there has been no essential change in the fashion of the
self-binder. It is the same to-day as when McCormick was alive. In the
span of his single life the Reaper was born and grew to its full
maturity. He saw its Alpha and its Omega. Best of all, he saw not only
its humble arrival, in a remote Virginia settlement, but, as we shall
see, he saw it become the plaything of Emperors, the marvel of Siberian
plainsmen, the liberator of the land-serf in twenty countries, and the
bread-machine of one-half of the human race.