But Mrs. McCormick was much more than industrious. She had a fine pride in the ownership of beautiful things,—flowers and handsome clothes and silverware and mahogany furniture. Her flock of peacocks was one of the sights of the county; and in her later life, when she was for ten years the sole manager of the farm, she was accustomed to drive about in a wonderful carriage with folding steps, drawn by prancing horses and driven by a stately colored coachman,—an equipage of so much style and grandeur that it is still remembered by the neighbors. "She loved to drive fast," said one old lady; "and I was much impressed as a little girl with the startling way in which her horses would come clattering and dancing up to the door."

Thus there was in the McCormick home the spiritual and imaginative element that was vital to the development of a man whose whole life was a battle against the prejudices and "impossibilities" of the world. Cyrus McCormick was predestined, we may legitimately say, by the conditions of his birth, to accomplish his great work. From his father he had a specific training as an inventor; from his mother he had executive ability and ambition; from his Scotch-Irish ancestry he had the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that environed his home came the call for the Reaper, to lighten the heavy drudgery of the harvest.

CHAPTER III
THE INVENTION OF THE REAPER

NOT far from the McCormick homestead was the "Old Field School," built of logs and with a part of one of the upper logs cut out to provide a window. Here the boy Cyrus sat on a slab bench and studied five books as though they were the only books in the world,—Murray's Grammar, Dilworth's Arithmetic, Webster's Spelling Book, the Shorter Catechism, and the Bible.

He was a strong-limbed, self-contained, serious-natured boy, always profoundly intent upon what he was doing. Even at the age of fifteen he was inventive. One winter morning he brought to school a most elaborate map of the world, showing the two hemispheres side by side. First he had drawn it in ink upon paper, then pasted the paper upon linen, and hung it upon two varnished rollers. This map, which is still preserved, reveals a remarkable degree of skill and patience; and the fact that a mere lad could conceive of and create such a map was a week's wonder in the little community. "That boy," declared the teacher, "is beyond me."

At about this time he undertook to do a man's work in the reaping of the wheat, and here he discovered that to swing a cradle against a field of grain under a hot summer sun was of all farming drudgeries the severest. Both his back and his brain rebelled against it. One thing at least he could do,—he could make a smaller cradle, that would be easier to swing; and he did this, whittling away in the evening in the little log workshop.

"Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius," said an old laborer who had worked on the McCormick farm. "He was always trying to invent something." "He was a young man of great and superior talents," said a neighbor. At eighteen he studied the profession of surveying, and made a quadrant for his own use. This is still preserved, and bears witness to his good workmanship. From this time until his twenty-second year, there is nothing of exceptional interest recorded of him. He had grown to be a tall, muscular, dignified young man. The neighbors, in later years, remembered him mainly because he was so well dressed on Sundays, in broadcloth coat and beaver hat, and because of his fine treble voice as he led the singing in the country church.

Even as a youth he was absorbed in his inventions and business projects. He had no time for gayeties. In a letter written from Kentucky to a cousin, Adam McChesney, in 1831, he says: "Mr. Hart has two fine daughters, right pretty, very smart, and as rich probably as you would wish; but alas! I have other business to attend to."

Ever since Cyrus was a child of seven, it had been the most ardent ambition of his father to invent a Reaper. He had made one and tried it in the harvest of 1816, but it was a failure. It was a fantastic machine, pushed from behind by two horses. A row of short curved sickles were fastened to upright posts, and the grain was whirled against them by revolving rods. It was highly ingenious, but the sinewy grain merely bunched and tangled around its futile sickles; and the poor old Reaper that would not reap was hauled off the field, to become one of the jokes of the neighborhood.

This failure did not dishearten Robert McCormick. He persevered with Scotch-Irish tenacity, but in secret. Hurt by the jests of the neighbors, he worked thenceforward with the door of his workshop locked, or at night. He hid his Reaper, too, upon a shelf inside the workshop. "He allowed no one to see what he was doing, except his sons," said Davis McCormick, who is now the only living person in the neighborhood with a memory that extends back to that early period. "Yes," said this lone octogenarian, "Robert McCormick was a good man, a true Christian; and he worked for years to make a Reaper. He always kept his plans to himself, and he told his wife that if visitors came to the house, she should send one of the children to fetch him, and not allow the visitors to come to his workshop."

By the early Summer of 1831, Robert McCormick had so improved his Reaper that he gave it a trial in a field of grain. Again it was a failure. It did cut the grain fairly well, but flung it in a tangled heap. As much as this had been done before by other machines, and it was not enough. To cut the grain was only one-half of the problem; the other half of the problem, which up to this time no one had solved, was how to properly handle and deliver the grain after it was cut.

By this time Cyrus had become as much of a Reaper enthusiast as his father. Also, he had been studying out the reasons for his father's failure, and working out in his mind a new plan of construction. How this new plan was slowly moulded into shape by his creative fancy is now told for the first time. A manuscript, written by Cyrus H. McCormick himself, and which has not hitherto been made public, gives a complete description of the process of thought by which he became the inventor of the first practical Reaper. This account, it may be said in explanation, was written by Mr. McCormick shortly before the Chicago fire of 1871. It was to be published at that time, and was in type when the fire came and left not a vestige of the printery. The original manuscript was preserved; but the labor of rebuilding his factory prevented him from carrying out his original design. He wholly forgot his authorship in the troubles of his city; and so his own story of his invention lay untouched among the private papers of the family for thirty-eight years.

"Robert McCormick," says this document, "being satisfied that his principle of operation could not succeed, laid aside and abandoned the further prosecution of his idea." He had labored for fifteen years to make a Reaper that would reap, and he had failed.

At this point Cyrus took up the work that his father had reluctantly abandoned. He had never seen or heard of any Reaper experiments except those of his father; but he believed he saw a better way, and "devoted himself most laboriously to the discovery of a new principle of operation."

He showed his originality at the outset by beginning where his father and all other Reaper inventors had left off,—with the cutting of grain that lay in a fallen and tangled mass. He faced the problem worst end first. The Reaper that would cut such grain, he believed, must first separate the grain that is to be cut from the grain that is left standing. It must have at the end of its knife a curved arm—a divider. This idea was simple, but in the long history of harvesting grain no one had thought of it before.

Next, in order to cut this snarled and prostrate grain without missing any of it, the knife must have two motions: its forward motion, as drawn by the horses, and also a slashing sideways motion of its own. How was this to be done? McCormick's first thought was to cut the grain with a whirling wheel-knife, but this plan presented too many new difficulties. Suddenly the idea came to him—why not have a straight blade, with a back and forward motion of its own? This was the birth-idea of the reciprocating blade, which has been used to this day on all grain-cutting machines. It was not, like the divider, a wholly new conception; but Cyrus McCormick conceived it independently, and did more than any one else to establish it as the basic feature of the Reaper.

The third problem was the supporting of the grain while it was being cut, so that the knife would not merely flatten it to the ground. McCormick solved this by placing a row of fingers at the edge of the blade. These fingers projected a few inches, in such a way that the grain was caught and held in position to be cut. The shape of these fingers was afterwards much improved, to prevent wet grain from clogging the slit in which the knife slid back and forth.

A fourth device was still needed to lift up and straighten the grain that had fallen. This was done by a simple revolving reel, such as fishermen use for the drying of their nets. Several of the abortive Reapers that had been tried elsewhere had possessed some sort of a reel; but McCormick made his much larger than any other, so that no grain was too low to escape it.

The fifth factor in this assembling of a Reaper was the platform, to catch the cut grain as it fell; and from which the grain was to be raked off by a man who walked alongside of it. The sixth was the idea of putting the shafts on the outside, or stubble side, of the Reaper, making it a side-draught, instead of a "push" machine. And the seventh and final factor was the building of the whole Reaper upon one big driving-wheel, which carried the weight and operated the reel and cutting-blade. The grain-side end of the blade was at first supported by a wooden runner, and later—the following year—by a small wheel.

Such was the making of the first practical Reaper in the history of the world. It was as clumsy as a Red River ox-cart; but it reaped. It was made on right lines. The "new principle" that the youth McCormick laboriously conceived in the little log workshop became the basic type of a wholly new machine. It has never been displaced. Since then there have been 12,000 patents issued for reaper and mower inventions; but not one of them has overthrown the type of the first McCormick Reaper. Not one of the seven factors that he assembled has been thrown aside; and the most elaborate self-binder of to-day is a direct descendant of the crude machine that was thus created by a young Virginian farmer in 1831.

The young inventor toiled "laboriously," he says, to complete his Reaper in time for the harvest of 1831. He was very nearly too late, but a small patch of wheat was left standing at his request; and one day in July, with no spectators except his parents and his excited brothers and sisters, Cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his Reaper, and drove against the yellow grain. The reel revolved and swept the gentle wheat downwards upon the knife. Click! Click! Click! The white steel blade shot back and forth. The grain was cut. It fell upon the platform in a shimmering golden swath. From here it was raked off by a young laborer named John Cash. It was a roughly done specimen of reaping, no doubt. The reel and the divider worked poorly. But for a preliminary test it was a magnificent success. Here, at last, was a Reaper that reaped, the first that had ever been made in any country.

The scene of this first "reaping by horse-power" was then, and is to-day, one of unusual beauty. The field is near by the farm-house, rolling in several undulations to the rim of a winding little rivulet. In the centre of the field is a single tree, a wide-branched white oak, which was probably born before the first colonists arrived at Jamestown. And in the background, not more than two miles distant, rise the tall and jagged crags of the Blue Ridge, twelve sharp peaks flung high from deep ravines, on which the lights and shades are incessantly changing,—a most impressive staging for the first act of the drama of the Reaper.

This McCormick farm, having 600 acres of land, is now owned by the McCormick family. The whole region has changed but little. Once, and once only, the great noisy outside world surged into this quiet valley,—when a Union army under General Butler clattered through it, burning and destroying, and so close to the McCormick homestead that the blue uniforms could be seen from its front windows. Doubtless, when farmers have time to take a proper pride in the history of their own profession, they will visit the McCormick farm as a spot of historic interest,—the place where the New Agriculture was born. It is no longer a difficult place to reach, as it is now possible to lunch to-day in either Chicago or New York and to-morrow in the same comfortable red brick farm-house that sheltered the McCormicks in 1831.

Several days after the advent of the Reaper on the home farm, Cyrus McCormick had improved its reel and divider, and was ready for a public exhibition at the near-by village of Steele's Tavern. Here, with two horses, he cut six acres of oats in an afternoon, a feat which was attested in court in 1848 by his brothers William and Leander, and also by three of the villagers, John Steele, Eliza Steele, and Dr. N. M. Hitt. Such a thing at that time was incredible. It was equal to the work of six laborers with scythes, or twenty-four peasants with sickles. It was as marvellous as though a man should walk down the street carrying a dray-horse on his back.

The next year, 1832, Cyrus McCormick came out with his Reaper into what seemed to him "the wide, wide world." He gave a public exhibition near the little town of Lexington, which lay eighteen miles south of the farm. Fully one hundred people were present—several political leaders of local fame, farmers, professors, laborers, and a group of negroes who frolicked and shouted in uncomprehending joy.

At the start, it appeared as though this new contraption of a machine, which was unlike anything else that human eyes had ever seen, was to prove a grotesque failure. The field was hilly, and the Reaper jolted and slewed so violently that John Ruff, the owner of the field, made a loud protest.

"Here! This won't do," he shouted. "Stop your horses. You are rattling the heads off my wheat."

This was a hard blow to the young farmer-inventor. Several laborers, who were openly hostile to the machine as their rival in the labor market, began to jeer with great satisfaction. "It's a humbug," said one. "Give me the old cradle yet, boys," said another. These men were hardened and bent and calloused with the drudgery of harvesting. They worked twelve and fourteen hours a day for less than a nickel an hour. But they were as resentful toward a Reaper as the drivers of stage-coaches were to railroads, or as the hackmen of to-day are towards automobiles.

At this moment of apparent defeat, a man of striking appearance, who had been watching the floundering of the Reaper with great interest, came to the rescue.

"I'll give you a fair chance, young man," he said. "That field of wheat on the other side of the fence belongs to me. Pull down the fence and cross over."

This friend in need was the Honorable William Taylor, who was several years later a candidate for the governorship of Virginia. His offer was at once accepted by Cyrus McCormick, and as the second field was fairly level, he laid low six acres of wheat before sundown. This was no more than he had done in 1831, but on this occasion he had conquered a larger and more incredulous audience.

After the sixth acre was cut, the Reaper was driven with great acclaim into the town of Lexington and placed on view in the court-house square. Here it was carefully studied by a Professor Bradshaw of the Lexington Female Academy, who finally announced in a loud and emphatic voice, "This—machine—is worth—a hundred—thousand—dollars." This praise, from "a scholar and a gentleman," as McCormick afterwards called him, was very encouraging. And still more so was the quiet word of praise from Robert McCormick, who said, "It makes me feel proud to have a son do what I could not do."

Of all who were present on that memorable summer day, not one is now alive. Neither in Lexington nor in Staunton—the towns that lay on either side of the McCormick farm—can we find any one who saw the Reapers of 1831 and 1832. But among those who testified at various lawsuits that they had seen the Lexington Reaper operate were Colonel James McDowell, Colonel John Bowyer, Colonel Samuel Reed, Colonel A. T. Barclay, Dr. Taylor, William Taylor, John Ruff, John W. Houghawout, John Steele, James Moore, and Andrew Wallace. There was an old lady, also, in 1885, Miss Polly Carson, who told how she had seen the Reaper hauled along the road by two horses, which, she said, "had to be led by a couple of darkies, because they were scared to death by the racket of the machine." And she expressed the general unbelief of that day, very likely, by saying, "I thought it was a right smart curious sort of a thing, but that it wouldn't come to much."

Cyrus McCormick was far from being the first to secure a Reaper patent. He was the forty-seventh. Twenty-three others in Europe and twenty-three in the United States had invented machines of varying inefficiency; but there was not one of these which could have been improved into the proper shape. Without any exception, the rival manufacturers who rose up in later years to fight McCormick did him the homage of copying his Reaper; and certainly none of them attempted to offer for sale any type of machine that was invented prior to 1831.

A careful study of the pre-McCormick Reapers reveals one fault common to all,—they were made by theorists, to cut ideal grain in ideal fields. Some of them, if grain always grew straight and was perfectly willing to be cut, might have been fairly useful. They assuredly might have succeeded if grain grew in a parlor. But to cut actual grain in actual fields was another matter, and quite beyond their power. None of them, apparently, knew the fundamental difference between a Reaper and a mower. They did not observe that grain is easy to cut but hard to handle, while grass is hard to cut and easy to handle; and they persisted in the assumption that grain could be reaped by a mower.

These inventors who failed, but who doubtless blazed the way by their failures to the final success of McCormick, were not, as he was, a practical farmer on rough and hilly ground. One was a clergyman, who devised a six-wheel chariot, with many pairs of scissors, and which was to be pushed by horses and steered by a rudder that in rough ground would jerk a man's arm out of joint. A second of these inventors was a sailor, who experimented with a few stalks of straight grain stuck in gimlet holes in his workshop floor. A third was an actor, who had built a Reaper that would cut artificial grain on the stage. A fourth was a school-teacher, a fifth a machinist, and so on. In no instance can we find that any one of these pre-McCormick inventors was a farmer, who therefore knew what practical difficulties had to be overcome.

The farmers, on the other hand, thought first of these difficulties and scoffed at the parlor inventors. The editor of the "Farmer's Register" spoke the opinion of most farmers of that time when he said that "an insurmountable difficulty will sometimes be found to the use of reaping-machines in the state of the growing crops, which may be twisted and laid flat in every possible direction. A whole crop may be ravelled and beaten down by high winds and heavy rains in a single day."

One of the basic reasons, therefore, for the success of Cyrus McCormick was the fact that he was not a parlor inventor. He was primarily a farmer. He knew what wheat was and how it grew. And his first aim in making a reaper was not to produce a mechanical curiosity, nor to derive a fortune from the sale of his patent, but to cut the grain on his father's farm.

So far as the pre-McCormick inventors are concerned, the whole truth about them seems to be that a few invented fractional mowers or reapers that were fairly good as far as they went, and that most of them invented nothing that became of any lasting value. Nine-tenths of them were pathfinders in the sense that they showed what ought not to be done.

Very little attention would have been given them had it not been for the persistent effort made by rival manufacturers to detract from McCormick's reputation as an inventor. This they did in a wholly impersonal manner, of course, so that they should not be obliged to pay him royalties, and because his prestige as the original inventor of the Reaper enabled him to outsell them among the farmers.

But now that the competition of Reaper manufacturers has been tempered by consolidation, the time has arrived to do justice to Cyrus McCormick as the inventor of the Reaper. The stock phrase,—"He was less of an inventor than a business man," which was so widely used against him during his lifetime, ought now in all fairness to be laid aside. The fact is, as we have seen, that he was schooled as a boy into an inventive habit of mind; and that before his invention of the Reaper, he had devised a new grain-cradle, a hillside plow, and a self-sharpening plow. There is abundant corroborative evidence in the letters which he wrote to his father and brothers, instructing them to "make the divider and wheel post longer," to "put the crank one inch farther back," and so forth. Also, in the will of Robert McCormick, there is a clause authorizing the executor to pay a royalty to Cyrus of fifteen dollars apiece on whatever machines were sold by the family during that season, showing that the father, who of all men was in the best position to know, regarded Cyrus as the inventor.

Of all the manufacturers who fought McCormick in the patent suits of early days, three only have survived to see the passing of the McCormick Centenary—Ralph Emerson, C. W. Marsh, and William N. Whiteley. In response to a question as to Cyrus McCormick's place as an inventor, Mr. Whiteley said: "McCormick invented the divider and the practical reel; and he was the first man to make the Reaper a success in the field." Mr. Marsh said: "He was a meritorious inventor, although he combined the ideas of other men with his own; and he produced the first practical side-delivery machine in the market." And Mr. Emerson said: "The enemies of Cyrus H. McCormick have said that he was not an inventor, but I say that he was an inventor of eminence."

Thus it appears that the invention of the Reaper was not in any sense unique; it came about by an evolutionary process such as produced all other great discoveries and inventions. First come the dreamers, the theorists, the heroic innovators who awaken the world's brain upon a new line of thought. Then come the pioneers who solve certain parts of the problem and make suggestions that are of practical value. And then, in the fulness of time, comes one masterful man who is more of a doer than a dreamer, who works out the exact combination of ideas to produce the result, and establishes the new product as a necessary part of the equipment of the whole human family.

Cyrus Hall McCormick invented the Reaper. He did more—he invented the business of making Reapers and selling them to the farmers of America and foreign countries. He held preëminence in this line, with scarcely a break, until his death; and the manufacturing plant that he founded is to-day the largest of its kind. Thus, it is no more than an exact statement of the truth to say that he did more than any other member of the human race to abolish the famine of the cities and the drudgery of the farm—to feed the hungry and straighten the bent backs of the world.

CHAPTER IV
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.

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.

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—

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.

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.