When was mccormick reaper invented

William handled the company's finances, and Leander oversaw manufacturing. In the company's factory was completely destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. McCormick built a new factory with increased capacity and began to pursue overseas markets in earnest.

By the early s, the company had expanded into markets as far away as Russia and New Zealand. His son, Cyrus Jr. Throughout the s and s the company retained its position as the leading agricultural equipment manufacturer, however it found itself increasingly challenged by competitors in a somewhat depressed market.

The company's chief rival was the Deering Harvester Company. By McCormick and Deering were nearly equal in sales. When elected five years later, Lincoln later hired Stanton, anyway. Having lost the patent wars, but still opened the prairie and supplied the prairie farmer, Cyrus McCormick died in Chicago in , two years before his company's factories were the site of urban factory strikes that led to the Haymarket riot.

McCormick's great grand-nephew, Brooks McCormick, served in the s as chief executive of International Harvester, which became Navistar. McCormick — great nephew of Cyrus — continues to span the Chicago area. Skip to content. His machine, at first a local curiosity, proved to be enormously important. In the decades following McCormick's first attempts to bring mechanical aid to farm work , his invention would revolutionize farming in the United States and around the world.

McCormick's father had earlier tried to invent a mechanical device for harvesting but gave up on it. But in the summer of the son took up the job and labored for about six weeks in the family blacksmith shop. Confident he had worked out the tricky mechanics of the device, McCormick demonstrated it at a local gathering place, Steele's Tavern. The machine had some innovative features that would make it possible for a farmer to harvest grain faster than could ever be done by hand.

As the demonstration was later described, local farmers were at first puzzled by the peculiar contraption that looked like a sled with some machinery on top of it. There was a cutting blade and spinning parts which would hold grain heads while the stalks were being cut.

As McCormick began the demonstration, the machine was pulled through a wheat field behind a horse. The machinery began to move, and it was suddenly apparent that the horse pulling the device was doing all the physical work. McCormick only had to walk beside the machine and rake the wheat stalks into piles which could be bound as usual. The machine worked perfectly and McCormick was able to use it that year in the fall harvest. McCormick produced more of the machines, and at first, he only sold them to local farmers.

But as word of the machine's amazing functionality spread, he began selling more. He ultimately started a factory in Chicago.

The McCormick Reaper revolutionized agriculture , making it possible to harvest large areas of grain much faster than could have been done by men wielding scythes. Because farmers could harvest more, they could plant more. So McCormick's invention of the reaper made the possibility of food shortages, or even famine, less likely. It was said that before McCormick's machinery changed farming forever, families would have to struggle to cut enough grain during the fall to last them until the next harvest.

One farmer, highly skilled at swinging at scythe, might only be able to harvest two acres of grain in a day. With a reaper, one man with a horse could harvest large fields in a day. It was thus possible to have much larger farms, with hundreds or even thousands of acres. The earliest horse-drawn reapers made by McCormick cut the grain, which fell onto a platform so it could be raked up by a man walking alongside the machine.

Later models consistently added practical features, and McCormick's farm machinery business grew steadily. By the end of the 19th century, McCormick reapers did not just cut wheat, they could also thresh it and put it into sacks, ready for storage or shipment.