Inventors

To New York, then, he directed his thoughts. Merely to get there cost him a severer and a longer effort than men in general are capable of making. First he walked to Boston, ten miles distant, where he hoped to borrow from an old acquaintance $50, with which to provide for his family and pay his fare to New York. He not only failed in this, but he was arrested for debt and thrown into prison. Even in prison, while his old father was negotiating to procure his release, he labored to interest men of capital in his discovery, and made proposals for founding a factory in Boston. Having obtained his liberty, he went to a hotel and spent a week in vain efforts to effect a small loan. Saturday night came, and with it his hotel bill, which he had no means of discharging. In an agony of shame and anxiety, he went to a friend and entreated the sum of $5 to enable him to return home. He was met with a point-blank refusal. In the deepest dejection, he walked the streets till late in the night, and strayed at length, almost beside himself, to Cambridge, where he ventured to call upon a friend and ask shelter for the night. He was hospitably entertained, and the next morning walked wearily home, penniless and despairing. At the door of his house a member of his family met him with the news that his youngest child, two years old, whom he had left in perfect health, was dying. In a few hours he had in his house a dead child, but not the means of burying it, and five living dependents without a morsel of food to give them. A storekeeper near by had promised to supply the family, but, discouraged by the unforeseen length of the father's absence, he had that day refused to trust them further. In these terrible circumstances he applied to a friend, upon whose generosity he knew he could rely, one who never failed him. He received in reply a letter of severe and cutting reproach, enclosing $7, which his friend explained was given only out of pity for his innocent and suffering family. A stranger who chanced to be present when this letter arrived sent them a barrel of flour, a timely and blessed relief. The next day the family followed on foot the remains of the little child to the grave.

This was about the darkest hour of poor Goodyear's life, but it was before the dawn. He managed to obtain $50, with which he went to New York, and succeeded in interesting two brothers, William and Emory Rider, in his discoveries. They agreed to advance to him a certain sum to complete his experiments. By means of this aid he was enabled to keep his family from want, and his experiments were pursued with greater ease and certainty. His brother-in-law, William De Forrest, a rich wool manufacturer, also came to his aid, now that success seemed in view. Nevertheless, the experiments of that and the following year cost nearly $50,000. Thanks to this timely aid, he was able in 1844, ten years after beginning his work, to produce perfect vulcanized india-rubber with economy and certainty. To the end of his life he was at work, however, endeavoring to improve the material and apply it to new uses. He took out more than sixty patents covering different processes of making rubber goods.

"No inventor, probably, has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world as 'pirates.' The spoliation of their incessant guerrilla warfare upon his defenceless rights has unquestionably amounted to millions."

Goodyear died in New York in July, 1860, worn out with work and disappointment. Neither Europe nor America seemed disposed to accord him any reward or credit for having made one of the greatest discoveries of the time. Notwithstanding his invention, which has made millions for those engaged in working it, he died insolvent, and left his family heavily in debt. A few years after his death an effort was made to procure from Congress an extension of his patent for the benefit of his family and creditors. The opposition of the men who had grown rich and powerful by successfully infringing his rights prevented that august body from doing justice in the matter and the effort came to nothing.

VII.

By the roadside near a mountain hamlet of Central Sweden stands a pyramid of iron cast from ore dug from the adjacent mines and set upon a base of granite quarried from the hills which overlook the valley. This monument bears the information that two brothers, Nils Ericsson and John Ericsson, were born in a miner's hut at that place, respectively, January 31, 1802, and July 31, 1803. Nils Ericsson was a man of unusual distinction, who held high position in Sweden as engineer of the canals and railroads of the kingdom. The name of his brother is known the world over. These two notable Swedes were sons of Olof Ericsson, a Swedish miner. Poverty was one of the bits of good fortune that fell to the lot of the two boys, and among John's earliest recollections is that of the seizure of their household effects by the sheriff. The mother was a woman of intelligence and somewhat acquainted with the literature of her time. In boyhood John Ericsson worked in the iron mines of Central Sweden. Machinery was his first love and his last. Before he was eleven years old, during the winter of 1813, he had produced a miniature saw-mill of ingenious construction, and had planned a pumping-engine designed to keep the mines free from water. The frame of the saw-mill was of wood; the saw-blade was made from a watch-spring and was moved by a crank made from a broken tin spoon. A file, borrowed from a neighboring blacksmith, a gimlet, and a jack-knife were the only tools used in this work. His pumping-engine was a more ambitious affair, to be operated by a wind-mill.

The family then lived in the wilderness, surrounded by a pine forest, where Ericsson's father was engaged in selecting timber for the lock-gates of a canal. A quill and a pencil were the boy's tools in the way of drawing materials. He made compasses of birch wood. A pair of steel tweezers were converted into a drawing-pen. Ericsson had never seen a wind-mill, but following as well as he could the description of those who had, he succeeded in constructing on paper the mechanism connecting the crank of a wind-mill with the pump-lever. The plan, conceived and executed under such circumstances by a mere boy, attracted the attention of Count Platen, president of the Gotha Ship Canal, on which Ericsson's father was employed, and when Ericsson was twelve years old he was made a member of the surveying party carrying out the canal work and put in charge of a section. Six hundred of the royal troops looked for directions in their daily work to this boy, one of his attendants being a man who followed him with a stool, upon which he stood to use the surveying instruments. The amusements of this boy engineer, even at the age of fifteen, are indicated by a portfolio of drawings made in his leisure moments, giving maps of the most important parts of the canal, three hundred miles in length, and showing all the machinery used in its construction. His precocity was, however, the normal and healthy development of a mind as fond of mechanical principles as Raphael was of color.

It was in 1811 that Ericsson made his first scale drawing of the famous Sunderland Iron Bridge, and from that time on his career in Sweden was a brilliant one. After serving as an engineer upon the Gotha Canal he became an officer in the Swedish army, from which circumstance he got his title of captain. Most government work was then done by army officers, especially in field surveying. The appointments of government surveyors being offered soon afterward to competitive examination among the officers of the army, Ericsson went to Stockholm and entered the lists. Detailed maps of fifty square miles of Swedish territory, still upon file at Stockholm, show his skill. Though his work as a surveyor exceeded that of any of his companions, he was not satisfied. He sought an outlet for his superfluous activity in preparing the drawings and engraving sixty-four large plates for a work illustrating the Gotha Canal. His faculty for invention was shown here by the construction of a machine-engraver, with which eighteen copper-plates were completed by his own hand within a year.

From engraving young Ericsson turned his attention to experiments with flame as a means of producing mechanical power, and it is interesting to note that forty years afterward a large part of his income in this country was derived from his gas-or flame-engine, thousands of which are now in use in New York City alone for pumping water up to the tops of the houses. His early flame-engine, as it was called, turned out so well that after building one of ten horse-power, he obtained leave of absence to go to England to introduce the invention. He never returned to Sweden for any length of time, although he remained a Swede at heart, and many Swedish orders and decorations have been conferred upon him. In addition to the monument near Ericsson's birthplace, already mentioned, the government has erected a granite shaft, eighteen feet high, in front of the cottage in which he was born. This shaft, bearing the inscription, "John Ericsson was born here in 1803," was dedicated on September 3, 1867, when work was suspended in the neighboring mines and iron furnaces, and a holiday was held in honor of Sweden's famous son. Poems were read, the chief engineer of the mining district delivered an oration, and Dr. Pallin, a savant from Philipstad, reminded his hearers that seven cities in Greece contended for the honor of being Homer's birthplace. "Certificates of baptism did not then exist," said Dr. Pallin, "and there is no doubt with us as to Ericsson's birthplace; yet to guard against all accidents we have here placed a record of baptism weighing eighty thousand pounds." The monument stands on an isthmus between two lakes surrounded by green hills.

Ericsson's life in England began in 1826. Fortune did not smile upon his efforts to introduce his flame-engine, for the coal fire which had to be used in England was too severe for the working parts of the apparatus. But Ericsson possessed a capacity for hard work that recognized no obstacles. He undertook a new series of experiments which resulted finally in the completion of an engine which was patented and sold to John Braithwaite. Young Ericsson's capacity for work and for keeping half a dozen experiments in view at the same time seems to have been as remarkable in those early days as when he became famous. Records of the London Patent Office credit him with invention after invention. Among these were a pumping-engine on a new principle; engines with surface condensers and no smoke-stack, as applied to the steamship Victory in 1828; an apparatus for making salt from brine; for propelling boats on canals; a hydrostatic weighing machine, to which the Society of Arts awarded a prize; an instrument to be used in taking deep-sea soundings; a file-cutting machine. The list covers some fourteen patented inventions and forty machines.

The railroad directors, at whose invitation this test was made, had asked for ten miles an hour; Ericsson gave them thirty. The excitement of the witnesses found vent in loud cheers. Within an hour the shares of the railroad company rose ten per cent., and the young engineer might well have considered his fortune made. But although he had beaten his rival ten miles an hour, the judges determined to make traction power, rather than speed, the critical test, and the prize was awarded to Stephenson's Rocket, which drew seventeen tons for seventy miles at the rate of thirteen miles an hour. Stephenson's engine weighed twice as much as Ericsson's. Nevertheless Ericsson's success with the Novelty was such as to keep him busy in this particular field. He followed it up with a steam fire-engine that astonished London at the burning of the Argyle Rooms, in 1829, when for the first time, as one of the local papers remarked, "fire was extinguished by the mechanical power of fire." Another engine, of larger power, built for the King of Prussia, soon after rendered excellent service in Berlin, and a third was built for Liverpool in 1830. Ten years afterward the Mechanics' Institute of New York awarded a gold medal to Ericsson as a prize for the best plan of a steam-engine.

Disappointed in his ill success with inventions pertaining to locomotives, Ericsson now turned his attention to his early flame-engine, and the working model of a caloric engine of five-horse power soon attracted the attention of London. At first there seemed to be a great future for engines upon this principle, but after many years of experiments, at great expense, Ericsson found that the principle was useful only for purposes requiring small power. In 1851 he built a heat-engine for the ship Ericsson, a vessel two hundred and sixty feet in length, and tells the result as follows: "The ship after completion made a successful trip from New York to Washington and back during the winter season; but the average speed at sea proving insufficient for commercial purposes, the owners, with regret, acceded to my proposition to remove the costly machinery, although it had proved perfect as a mechanical combination. The resources of modern engineering having been exhausted in producing the motors of the caloric ship, the important question, Can heated air, as a mechanical motor, compete on a large scale with steam? has forever been set at rest. The commercial world is indebted to American enterprise for having settled a question of such vital importance. The marine engineer has thus been encouraged to renew his efforts to perfect the steam-engine without fear of rivalry from a motor depending on the dilation of atmospheric air by heat."

Before leaving this question of heat-engines and passing to the more important inventions by which Ericsson will be remembered, it may be as well to say a few words concerning the solar-engines to which he devoted many years' time, and one of which I saw in operation in the back yard of the pleasant old house in Beach Street, opposite the freight depot of the Hudson River Railroad. This house, by the way, which Ericsson occupied for nearly forty years, faced on St. John's Park, the pleasant square which was afterward filled up by the railroad company. Toward the last years of Ericsson's life the neighborhood became anything but a pleasant one to live in; it was dirty and noisy. Nevertheless Ericsson refused to move. Perhaps the unpleasantness of the surroundings made him the recluse he was. It is not surprising that he should have been attracted by the possibility of obtaining power from the heat of the sun. In an early pamphlet on the subject he says: "There is a rainless region extending from the northwestern coast of Africa to Mongolia, nine thousand miles in length and nearly one thousand miles wide. In the Western Hemisphere, Lower California, the table-lands of Guatemala, and the west coast of South America, for a distance of more than two thousand miles, suffer from a continuous radiant heat." Ericsson estimated that the mechanical power that would result from utilizing the solar heat on a strip of land a single mile wide and eight thousand miles long would suffice to keep twenty-two million solar-engines, of one hundred horse-power each, going nine hours a day. He believed that with the exhaustion of European coal-fields the day for the solar-engine would come, and that those countries which possessed unfailing sunshine, such as Egypt, would displace England, France, and Germany as the manufacturing powers of the world, for the European would have to move his machinery to the borders of the Nile. By concentrating the rays of the sun upon a small copper boiler filled with air Ericsson was enabled to work a little motor, and for some years he also attempted to produce steam by means of heat from the sun. He was not successful, however, in making anything of commercial value in this direction, and so far as I have been able to learn none of the tropical countries invited by him to take up the problem for its own benefit responded to the invitation.

Ericsson's studies and improvements of the screw as a means of propelling boats began in England. A model boat, two feet long, fitted up with two screws, was launched in a London bath-house, and, supplied by steam from a boiler placed at the side of the tank, was sent around at a speed estimated at six miles an hour. Ericsson was so delighted with it that he built a boat eight feet by forty, armed with two propellers, in the hope that the British Admiralty might adopt the invention. This boat went through the water at the rate of ten miles an hour, or seven miles an hour towing a schooner of one hundred and forty tons burden. He invited the Admiralty to see the work of his screw. Steaming up to Somerset House with his little vessel, Ericsson took the Admiralty barge in tow, to the wonder of the watermen, who could make nothing of the novel craft with no apparent means of propulsion. The British Admiralty, however, was not easily convinced. These wiseacres said nothing, but Ericsson professed to have heard that their verdict was against him because one of the authorities of the board decided that "even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power, being applied to the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer."

This official blindness cost England the services of the inventor. The United States happened to have as consul in Liverpool at that day (1837) Mr. Francis B. Ogden, a pioneer in steam navigation on the Ohio River. Ogden saw Ericsson's invention and introduced him to Captain Robert F. Stockton, of the United States Navy. With Stockton, seeing was believing, and when he returned from a trip on Ericsson's boat, he exclaimed: "I do not want the opinion of your scientific men. What I have seen to-day satisfies me." Before the vessel had completed her trip, Ericsson received from Stockton an order for two boats. Upon Stockton's assurance that the United States would try his propeller upon a large scale, Ericsson closed up his affairs in England and embarked for the United States. Through the good offices of Stockton, but after considerable delay, a vessel called the Princeton was ordered and completed. She carried a number of radical improvements destined to make a revolution in naval warfare. The boilers and engines were below the waterline, out of the way of shot and shell. The smoke-stack was a telescopic affair, replacing the tall pipe that formed so conspicuous a target upon the old boats. Centrifugal blowers in the hold, worked by separate engines, secured increased draught for the furnaces. The Princeton was a wonder, and everyone was ready to praise the inventive genius of Ericsson and the daring of Captain Stockton in adopting so many radical novelties. An entry in the diary of John Quincy Adams, dated February 28, 1844, tells the sad story of the public exhibition of the Princeton at Washington:

"I went into the chamber of the Committee of Manufactures and wrote there till six. Dined with Mr. Grinnell and Mr. Winthrop. While we were at dinner John Barney burst into the chamber, rushed up to General Scott and told him, with groans, that the President wished to see him; that the great gun on board the Princeton had burst and killed the Secretary of State, Upshur; the Secretary of the Navy, T.W. Gilmer; Captain Beverly Kennon, Virgil Maxey, a Colonel Gardiner, of New York, a colored servant of the President, and desperately wounded several of the crew."

So tragic an introduction was not needed to direct public attention to the Princeton. Ericsson had placed the United States at the head of naval powers in the application of steam-power to warfare. He had made the experiment of the Princeton at a great cost to himself, and two years of concentrated effort had been devoted to the service of the Government. For his time, labor, and necessary expenditures he rendered a bill of $15,000, leaving the question of what, if anything, should be charged for his patent rights entirely to the discretion and generosity of the Government. The bill was refused payment by the Navy Department because of its limited discretion. Ericsson went to Congress with it, but a dozen years passed without the slightest progress toward a settlement. A court of claims rendered a unanimous decree in his favor, but Congress, to which the bill was again sent, failed to make an appropriation, and there the matter has remained, notwithstanding the brilliant services since rendered to this country by the inventor.

Various nations claim the invention of the screw as applied to boats. At Trieste and at Vienna stand statues erected to Joseph Ressel, for whom the Austrians lay claim. Commodore Stevens, of New Jersey, is also said by Professor Thurston to have built and worked a screw-propeller on the Hudson in 1812. Whatever may be the final decision as to Ericsson's claim in this matter, there can be no doubt as to the value of the services he rendered in building the Monitor. The suggestion of the Monitor was first made in a communication from Ericsson to Napoleon III., dated New York, September, 1854. This paper contained a description of an iron-clad vessel surmounted by a cupola substantially as in the Monitor as finally built. The emperor, through General Favre, acknowledged the communication. Favre wrote: "The emperor has himself examined with the greatest care the new system of naval attack which you have communicated to him. His Majesty charges me with the honor of informing you that he has found your ideas very ingenious and worthy of the celebrated name of their author." For eight years Ericsson continued working upon his idea of a revolving cupola or turret upon an iron-clad raft, but found no opportunity to test the practical value of the device. His time finally came when, in 1861, the Navy Department appointed a board to examine plans for iron-clads. The board consisted of Commodores Joseph Smith, Hiram Paulding, and Charles H. Davis. Ericsson, having learned to distrust his own powers as a business agent, engaged the assistance of C. S. Bushnell, a Connecticut man of some wealth, who went to Washington and presented the designs of the Monitor to the board.

Colonel W.C. Church, Ericsson's biographer, who has just been honored by Sweden for his publications upon the life of the inventor, tells an interesting story of the negotiations concerning the vessel which was to render such signal services to the country. Bushnell could make no headway with the board and decided that Ericsson's presence in Washington was necessary. But the inventor was then, as during his whole life, averse to any self-advertisement, and preferred his workshop to any place on earth. But as he possessed a sort of rude eloquence due to enthusiasm, Bushnell got him to Washington by subterfuge. He was told that the board approved his plans for an iron-clad and that it would be necessary for him to go to the capital and complete the contract. Presenting himself before the board, what was his astonishment to find that he was not only an unexpected but apparently an unwelcome visitor. He was not long in doubt as to the meaning of this reception. To his indignation and astonishment he was informed that the plan of a vessel submitted by him had already been rejected. His first impulse was to withdraw at once. Mastering his anger, however, he inquired the reason for this decision. Commodore Smith explained that the vessel had not sufficient stability; in other words, it would be liable to upset. Captain Ericsson was too experienced a naval designer to have overlooked this point, and in a lucid explanation put his views before the board, winding up with the declaration: "Gentlemen, after what I have said, I consider it to be your duty to the country to give me an order to build the vessel before I leave this room."

Withdrawing to a corner the board held a consultation and invited the inventor to call again at one o'clock. When Ericsson returned he brought with him a diagram illustrating more fully his reasons for considering his proposed vessel to be perfectly stable. Commodore, afterward Admiral, Paulding was convinced, and admitted that Ericsson had taught him much about the stability of vessels. Secretary Welles was informed that the board reported favorably upon Ericsson's plan, and told the inventor that he might return to New York and begin work, as the contract would follow him. When the contract came it was found to be a singularly one-sided affair. If the Monitor proved vulnerable—in other words; if it was not a success—the money paid for it by the Navy Department was to be refunded.

It took one hundred days to build the Monitor. During those three months Ericsson scarcely slept, and even in his dreams he went over the details of the new-fangled war-engine he was building. He named her Monitor because, he said, she would warn the nations of the world that a new era in naval warfare had begun. The story of his untiring activity has been told almost as often as that of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac. He was at the ship-yard before any of the workmen, and was the last to leave. In the construction of so novel a craft difficulties of a puzzling nature came up every day. If Ericsson could not solve them on the spot, he studied the matter in the quiet of the night, and was ready with his drawings in the morning. The result of the naval battle in Hampton Roads, on the 9th of March, 1862, between the little Monitor and the big Merrimac made Ericsson the hero of the hour. Had no David appeared to stop the ravages of the Confederate Goliath, it is hard to say what might not have been the injury inflicted upon the cause of the Union by the terrible Merrimac. The United States Navy was virtually panic-stricken when the Monitor, this "Yankee cheese-box on a plank," as the Southerners called her, came to the rescue.

War vessels upon the plan of the Monitor speedily appeared among the navies of several nations. England refused at first to admit the value of the invention and was not converted until the double-turreted Miantonomoh visited her waters in 1866, when one of the London papers described her appearance among the British fleet as that of a wolf among a flock of sheep. The day of the big wooden war-vessels was over. It was, nevertheless, an Englishman and a naval officer, Captain Cowper Coles, who sought to deprive Ericsson of the honor of his invention. Coles declared that he had devised a ship during the Crimean War, in which a turret or cupola was to protect the guns. Ericsson's letter to Napoleon III., written in 1854, is sufficient answer to this, besides which Ericsson's scheme includes more than a stationary shield for the guns, which is all that Coles claimed. Coles succeeded, however, in inducing the British Admiralty to build a vessel according to his plans. This ill-fated craft upset off Cape Finisterre on the night of September 6, 1870, and went to the bottom with Coles and a crew of nearly five hundred men.

Of Ericsson's home life there is not much to be told. He was utterly wrapped up in his work. With his devoted secretary, Mr. Arthur Taylor, his days knew scarcely any variation. Of social recreation he had none. In conversation he was abrupt and somewhat peculiar, apparently regarding all other talk than that relating to mechanics and germane subjects as a waste of words. His shrewd face, with its blue eyes and fringe of white hair, was not an unkindly one, however, and the few workmen he employed in the Beach Street house were devoted to him. No great man was ever more intensely averse to personal notoriety. Although often advised to make his Destroyer better known by means of newspaper articles, he persistently refused to see newspaper men; and the professional interviewer and lion-hunter were his pet aversions. It was perhaps to avoid them that he left his house only after nightfall, and then but for a walk in the neighborhood.

His time was divided according to rule. For thirty years he was called by his servant at seven o'clock in the morning, and took a bath of very cold water, ice being added to it in summer. After some gymnastic exercises came breakfast at nine o'clock, always of eggs, tea, and brown bread. His second and last meal of the day, dinner, never varied from chops or steak, some vegetables, and tea and brown bread again. Ice-water was the only luxury that he indulged in. He used tobacco in no form. During the daytime he was accustomed to work at his desk or drawing-table for about ten hours. After dinner he resumed work until ten, when he started out for the stroll of an hour or more, which always ended his day. The last desk work accomplished every day was to make a record in his diary, always exactly one page long. This diary is in Swedish and comprises more than fourteen thousand pages, thus covering a period of forty years, during which he omitted but twenty days, in 1856, when he had a finger crushed by machinery. He scarcely knew what sickness was, and just before his death said that he had not missed a meal for fifteen years. He was a widower and left no children. He died in the Beach Street house, after a short illness, on March 8, 1889, and his remains were transferred to Sweden with naval honors.

VIII.

In the course of an argument before the Commissioner of Patents, in 1859, the late Reverdy Johnson declared that the McCormick reaper was worth $55,000,000 a year to this country, an estimate that was not disputed. At about the same time the late William H. Seward said that "owing to Mr. McCormick's invention the line of civilization moves westward thirty miles each year." Already the London Times, after ridiculing the McCormick reaper exhibited at the London World's Fair of 1851, as "a cross between an Astley (circus) chariot, a wheel-barrow, and a flying-machine," confessed, when the reaper had been tested in the fields, that it was "worth to the farmers of England the whole cost of this exhibition." Writing of this glorious success, Mr. Seward said: "So the reaper of 1831, as improved in 1845, achieved for its inventor a triumph which all then felt and acknowledged was not more a personal one than it was a national one. It was justly so regarded. No general or consul, drawn in a chariot through the streets of Rome by order of the Senate, ever conferred upon mankind benefits so great as he who thus vindicated the genius of our country at the World's Exhibition of Art in the metropolis of the British empire in 1851." In 1861, though declining to extend the patent for the reaper, the Commissioner of Patents, D.P. Holloway, paid the inventor this remarkable tribute: "Cyrus H. McCormick is an inventor whose fame, while he is yet living, has spread through the world. His genius has done honor to his own country, and has been the admiration of foreign nations, and he will live in the grateful recollection of mankind as long as the reaping-machine is employed in gathering the harvest." Nevertheless the extension of the patent of 1834, which act of justice would have given the inventor an opportunity to obtain an adequate reward for his work, was refused upon the extraordinary ground that "the reaper was of too great value to the public to be controlled by any individual." In other words, the benefit conferred by McCormick upon the country was too great to be paid for; therefore no effort should be made to pay for it. Finally, the French Academy of Sciences, when McCormick was elected to the Institute of France—an honor paid but to few Americans—mentioned the election as due to "his having done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."

It is thus evident that the tremendous service done to the civilized world by the invention of the McCormick reaper was appreciated years ago. Yet it is improbable that the whole value of the invention was fully realized. To-day the McCormick works at Chicago turn out yearly, and have turned out for several years, more than one hundred thousand reapers and mowers. At a moderate estimate every McCormick reaper, and every reaper founded upon it and containing its essential features, saves the labor of six men during the ten harvest days of the year. The present number of reapers in operation to-day, all of them based upon the McCormick patents, is estimated at about two million, so that, counting a man's labor at $1 a day, here is a yearly saving of more than $100,000,000. The reaper thus stands beside the steam-engine and the sewing-machine as one of the most important labor-saving inventions of our time, relieving millions of men from the most arduous drudgery and increasing the world's wealth by hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It is some satisfaction to know that the inventor of the reaper lived to enjoy the fruits of his work. A remarkable man in every respect, his ingenuity, perseverance, courage under injustice, and generosity finally won him not only the material rewards that were his by right, but the esteem and honor of the civilized world.

Like Fulton and Morse, Cyrus Hall McCormick came of Scotch-Irish blood, a race marked by fixed purpose, untiring industry in carrying out that purpose, a strong sense of moral obligation, and an unswerving determination to do right by the light of conscience though the heavens fall. He was born on the 15th of February, 1809, at Walnut Grove, in Rockbridge County, Va., and was the eldest of eight children, six of whom lived to grow up. His father, Robert McCormick, in addition to farming, had workshops of considerable importance on his farm, as well as a saw-mill and grist-mill and smelting furnaces. In these workshops young Cyrus McCormick probably got his first love for mechanical devices. Robert McCormick was an inventor of no mean attainment. He devised and built a thresher, a hemp-breaker, some mill improvements, and in 1816 he made and tried a mechanical reaper. In those days so much of the farmer's hard labor was expended in swinging the scythe that it seems strange we have no record of more attempts to make a machine do the work. A schoolmaster named Ogle is said to have built a reaper in 1822, but, according to his own admission, it would not work. Bell, a Scotch minister, also contrived a reaping-machine that was tried in 1828. In the course of the subsequent patent litigation over the reaper the claims of these early inventors were made the most of by McCormick's opponents, but the courts of last resort invariably settled the question in McCormick's favor.

As a farmer boy, young Cyrus McCormick began his day's work in the fields at five o'clock. In winter he went to the Old Field School. During his boyhood he would watch his father's experiments and disappointments. His first attempt in the same direction was the construction, at the age of fifteen, of a harvesting-cradle by which he was enabled to keep up with an able-bodied workman. His first patented invention (1831) was a plough which threw alternate furrows on either side, being thus either a right-hand or left-hand plough. This was superseded in 1833 by an improved plough, also by McCormick, called the self-sharpening plough, which did excellent work. His father having worked long and unsuccessfully at a mechanical reaper, it was natural that young McCormick's mind should turn over the same problem from time to time, and his father's failures did not deter him, although Robert McCormick had suffered so much in mind and pocket through the impracticability of his reaper that he warned his son against wasting more time and money upon the dream. One martyr to mechanical progress was enough for the McCormick family. But the possibility of making a machine do the hard, hot work of the harvest-field had a fascination for the young man, and the more he studied the discarded reaping-machine made by his father in 1816, the more firmly he became convinced that while the principle of that device was wrong, the work could be done. In those days the development of the country really depended upon some better, cheaper way of harvesting. The land was fertile, and there was practically no end of it. But labor was scarce.