Meantime rival claimants to the invention were appearing on all sides. Morse decided that he must try to secure European patents, and went abroad for that purpose. His claim was opposed in England, and in France it was finally decided that in the case of such an invention the government must be the owner. He was well received, and given the fullest credit for his achievements, but the patents were refused, and he had to return home with his small capital much depleted and business prospects at a low ebb. Moreover, the United States government now seemed to have lost interest in the subject, and his partners, the Vails, were having financial difficulties of their own.

While he waited he continued to experiment. He believed that the electric current could be sent under water as easily as through the air, and to try this he insulated a wire two miles long with hempen threads that were saturated with pitch-tar and wrapped with India-rubber. He unreeled this cable from a small rowboat between Castle Garden and Governor’s Island in New York Harbor on the night of October 18, 1842. At daybreak Morse was at the station at the Battery, and began to send a message through his submarine cable. He had succeeded in sending three or four characters when the communication suddenly stopped, and although he waited and kept on with his trials no further letters could be transmitted. On investigation it appeared that no less than seven ships were lying along the line of Morse’s cable, and that one of these, in getting under way, had lifted the cable on her anchor. The sailors hauled two hundred feet of it on deck, and, seeing no end to it, cut it, and carried part of it away with them. But the test had proved Morse’s theory, and he became convinced that in time messages could be sent across the ocean as easily as over land.

When Congress met in December, 1842, Morse again appeared in Washington to obtain financial help. Congress was not very enthusiastic over his project, but the House Committee on Commerce finally recommended an appropriation of $30,000, and a bill to that effect was passed in the House of Representatives by the small majority of six votes. The Senate was overcrowded with bills, and Morse’s was continually postponed. In the early evening of the last day of the session there were one hundred and nineteen bills to come to vote before his, and it seemed impossible that it should be taken up. Morse, who had been sitting in the gallery all day, concluded that further waiting was useless, and went back to his hotel, planning to leave for New York early the next morning. He found that after paying his hotel bill he would have less than half a dollar in the world. But as he came down to breakfast the following morning he was met by Miss Ellsworth, the daughter of his friend, the Commissioner of Patents. She held out her hand, saying, “I have come to congratulate you.”

“Congratulate me! Upon what?” asked Morse.

“On the passage of your bill,” she answered.

“Impossible! It couldn’t come up last evening. You must be mistaken,” said the inventor.

“No,” said Miss Ellsworth, “father sent me to tell you that your bill was passed. He remained until the session closed, and yours was the last bill but one acted upon, and it was passed just five minutes before the adjournment.”

In return for this news Morse promised that Miss Ellsworth should send the first message when his telegraph line was opened. That same day he wrote to Alfred Vail that the bill “was reached a few minutes before midnight and passed. This was the turning point in the history of the telegraph. My personal funds were reduced to the fraction of a dollar, and, had the passage of the bill failed from any cause, there would have been little prospect of another attempt on my part to introduce to the world my new invention.”

It had been decided to construct an underground line between Washington and Baltimore, the conductor being a five-wire cable laid in pipes, but after several miles had been laid from Baltimore the insulation broke down. A very large part of the government grant had been spent, and the situation looked very dubious. But after some discussion it was determined to carry the wire by poles, as this could be done much more rapidly and at smaller expense.

The National Whig Convention, to nominate candidates for President and Vice-President, met at Baltimore on May 1, 1844. The overhead wire had been started from Washington toward Baltimore, and by that day twenty-two miles of it were in working order. The day before the convention met Morse had arranged with Vail that certain signals should mean that certain candidates had been nominated. Henry Clay was named for President, and the news was carried by railroad to the point where Morse had stretched his wire. He signaled it to Washington, and the Capitol heard it long before the first messages arrived by train.

On May 24, 1844, the line was completed, and Miss Ellsworth was invited to send the first message from the room of the United States Supreme Court to Baltimore. She chose the Biblical words “What hath God wrought?” and this was sent over the telegraph. Vail received the message in Baltimore, and the first demonstration was a complete success. The younger man had added an improvement of his own; instead of the dots and dashes being indicated by the markings of a pen or pencil they were embossed on the paper with a metal stylus.

An incident in connection with the Democratic Convention, which was then in session in Baltimore for the purpose of nominating presidential candidates, added to the public interest in Morse’s telegraph. The Democrats had named James K. Polk for President and Silas Wright for Vice-President. The news was sent by wire to Washington, and Mr. Wright sent his message declining the honor over the telegraph. The chairman of the meeting, Hendrick B. Wright, received the message. In a letter to Benson J. Lossing he says, “As the presiding officer of the body I read the despatch, but so incredulous were the members as to the authority of the evidence before them that the convention adjourned over to the following day to await the report of the committee sent over to Washington to get reliable information on the subject.” The committee returned with word that the telegraph message had been correct. Then, all but the convention committee being excluded from the telegraph room in Baltimore, message after message was sent over the wire by Vail to Morse and Silas Wright in Washington. The committee used many arguments to urge Wright’s acceptance; he answered them all, persisting in his refusal; and finally this decision was reported to the convention, which nominated Mr. Dallas in his place. The story of the part the new invention had played quickly spread abroad, and added to the intense public interest now focussed on it.

On April 1, 1845, the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore was opened for general use. Congress had appropriated $8,000 to maintain it for the first year, and placed it under the direction of the Postmaster-General. The official charge was one cent for every four characters transmitted. The receipts of the first four days were one cent, for the fifth day twelve and a half cents, for the seventh sixty cents, for the eighth one dollar and thirty-two cents, for the ninth one dollar and four cents. Morse offered to sell his invention to the government for $100,000, but the Postmaster-General declined the offer, stating in his report that the service “had not satisfied him that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures.”

With the public opening of the line between Washington and Baltimore the practical success of the new electric telegraph was assured. The Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed to carry a wire from New York to Philadelphia, and thence another line was run to Baltimore in 1846. The telegraph being an accomplished fact, pirates of the patent now appeared, and for a course of years Morse and his partners had to fight for their rights. Henry O’Reilly, who had been employed in building the first lines, contracted to construct another from Philadelphia to St. Louis, and when that was finished he formed a company known as the People’s Line, to run to New Orleans. He claimed to use instruments entirely different from those patented by Morse, and so to be free from the payment of royalties. Morse applied for an injunction, and on appeal the Federal Supreme Court decided in his favor. Other similar suits followed, and in each one the decision justified Morse’s contention. The conclusion was that even though other men had known of the possibilities by experiment, it was the fact that he had first put the matter into practical form directed toward a specific purpose, and hence was to be regarded in law as the inventor.

The telegraph grew with the country. The Western Union Company followed the stage-coach across the plains to California, and soon the frontier towns were linked to the large cities of the East. Other men took up the work in other lines, and in 1854 Cyrus W. Field formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company to lay a cable between America and Europe. As Morse had said when he first began seriously to study the subject on board the Sully, “If it will go ten miles without stopping I can make it go around the globe.”

The inventor found himself universally honored, and at last a very wealthy man. He married Miss Griswold of Poughkeepsie, and bought an estate of two hundred acres near that city. He was given degrees by American and European universities and societies, was made a member of the French Legion of Honor, received orders of knighthood from the rulers of Spain and Italy, Denmark, Turkey, and Portugal. In 1858 the Emperor of the French called a Congress in Paris to honor Morse, and the Congress awarded him a gift of 400,000 francs as a token of gratitude. In his eightieth year his statue in bronze was placed in Central Park, New York, and his countrymen did their utmost to show him their appreciation of his great achievement. He died in 1872, a short time after he had unveiled a statue of Benjamin Franklin in New York’s Printing-house Square.

Morse was the inventor, but his partner Alfred Vail had a great share in making the present telegraph. He discarded the original porte-rule and type of the transmitter for the key or lever, moved up and down by hand to complete or break the circuit. He perfected the dot and dash code, he invented the device for embossing the message, and replaced the inking pen by a metal disc, smeared with ink, that rolled the dots and dashes on the paper. When it was found that the telegraph operators would read the signals from the clicking of the marking lever instead of from the paper, he made an instrument which had no marking device, and in which the signals were sounded by the striking of the lever of the armature against the metal stops. This “sounder” soon drove out the old Morse recorder. The present instrument is in its mechanical form far more the work of Vail than of Morse.

XI
McCORMICK AND THE REAPER
1809-1884

The same sturdy pioneer stock that gave America Daniel Boone and Lincoln, Robert Fulton and Andrew Jackson, produced the inventor of the reaper. He came of a line of resourceful, fearless Scotch-Irish settlers, bone of the bone and sinew of the sinew of those generations that laid the broad foundations of the United States. His great-grandfather had been an Indian fighter in the colony of Pennsylvania, his grandfather had moved to Virginia and fought in the Revolution, and his father had built a log-house and tilled a farm in that strip of arable Virginia land that lay between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains. He prospered, and added neighboring farms to his original holding; he had two grist-mills, two sawmills, a blacksmith shop, a smelting-furnace, and a distillery; he invented new makes of farm machinery, and in addition was a man of considerable reading, able to hold his own in discussion with the lawyers and the clergymen of the countryside. He was of that same well-developed type of countryman of whom so many were to be found in the thirteen original states and the borderlands to the west, that settler type which was the real backbone of the young country.

The McCormick house and farm was almost a small village in itself. There were eight children, and their shoes were cobbled, their clothes woven, their very beds and chairs and tables built at home. Whatever was needed could be done, the family were always busy within doors or without, and the spirit of helpfulness and invention was in the air. Into such a setting Cyrus Hall McCormick was born in 1809, the same year that saw the birth of Lincoln.

He went to one of the Old Field Schools, so called because it was built on ground that had been abandoned for farm use. He learned what other boys and girls were learning in simple country schools, but he studied harder than most of them, because he had a keen desire to understand thoroughly whatever subject he started. He saw his father busy in his workshop at all spare moments, and he took him as a pattern. After weeks of work he brought his teacher a remarkably exact map of the world, drawn to scale, and outlined in ink on paper pasted on linen, and fastened on two rollers. The work showed his ingenious fancy, and perhaps determined his father to have him educated as a surveyor. At eighteen he began this study, and had soon won a good reputation in the neighborhood as an engineer. Much of the time he spent in the fields with his father, and here he soon learned that reaping wheat was no easy task, and that swinging a wheat cradle under the summer sun was hard on both the temper and the back.

Many men had tried to lighten the farmer’s labor in cutting grain, and Cyrus McCormick’s father had long had the ambition to invent a reaper. He had succeeded in building a cumbersome machine that was pushed at the back by a pair of horses. The plan of the machine was well enough; it consisted of a row of short curved sickles that were fastened to upright posts. Revolving rods drove the wheat up against the sickles. The machine acted properly, but the grain would not. Instead of standing up straight and separated to be cut the wheat would more often come in great bunches, twisting about the sickles and getting tangled in the machinery. Mr. McCormick tried the machine in the harvesting of 1816, but it would not work, and had to be carted away to the workshop as an invention gone wrong. But he persevered with this idea, and from time to time built other models. After a number of years he brought forth a machine that would cut, but left the wheat after cutting in a badly tangled shape. He saw that this was not sufficient. The reaper to be of real use must dispose of the grain properly as well as shear the stalks.

Cyrus now took up the work that his father reluctantly abandoned. He decided to build his reaper on entirely new lines. First he dealt with the problem of how to separate the grain that was to be cut from that which was to be left standing. This he finally solved by adding a curved arm, or divider, to the end of his reaper’s blade. In this way the grain that was to be cut would be properly fed to the knife.

But the grain was apt to be badly tangled before the reaper reached it, and his machine must be able to cut that which was pressed down and out of shape as well as that which was standing straight. To accomplish this he decided that his knife must have two motions, one a forward cut, and the other sideways. He tried many plans before he finally hit upon one that solved this for him. It was a straight knife blade that moved forward and backward, cutting with each motion. This idea became known as the reciprocating blade.

Yet even though the machine could divide the grain properly, and the knife cut with a double motion, there was the possibility that the blade might simply press the grain down and so slide over it. This was especially apt to be the case after a rain, or when the grain had been badly blown about by the wind. The problem now was how to hold it upright. He found the solution lay in adding a row of indentations that projected a few inches from the edge of the knife, and acted like fingers in catching the stalks and holding them in place to be cut.

These three ideas, the divider, the reciprocating blade, and the fingers, were all fundamental devices of the machine Cyrus McCormick was building. They all met the question of how the grain could be cut. To these he next added a revolving reel, that would lift any grain that had fallen and straighten it, and a platform to catch the grain as it was cut and fell. His idea was that a man should walk along beside the reaper and rake off the grain as it fell upon the platform.

Two more devices, and his first machine was completed. One was to have the shafts placed on the outside of the reaper, or so that the horse would pull it sideways, instead of having to push it, as had been the case with his father’s model. The other was to have the whole machine practically operated by one big wheel, which should bear the weight and move the knife and the reel.

It had taken young McCormick many months to work out all these problems, and there were only one or two weeks each year, the harvest weeks, when he could actually try his machine. He wanted to use it in the spring of 1831, but he found that the work of finishing all the necessary details was enormous. He begged his father to leave a small patch of wheat for him to try to cut, and at last, one day in July of that year, he drove his cumbersome machine into the field. All his family watched as the reaper headed toward the grain. They saw the wheat gathered and swept down upon the knife, they saw the blade move back and forth and cut the grain, and then saw it fall upon the little platform. The machine worked with hitches, not nearly so smoothly nor so efficiently as it should, but it did work; it gathered the grain in and it left it in good shape to be raked off the platform. The trial proved that such a machine could be made to do the work, and that was all that the inventor wanted.

He drove it back to his workshop and made certain changes in the reel and the divider. Then, several days later, he drove it over to the little settlement at Steele’s Tavern, and cut six acres of oats in one afternoon. That was a marvelous feat, and caused great wonder in the countryside, but the harvesting season had ended, and the inventor would have to wait a year before he could prove the use of his machine again.

By the next year McCormick was ready for a larger audience. The town of Lexington lay some eighteen miles south of his home, and he made arrangements with a farmer there, named John Ruff, to give an exhibition of his reaper in the latter’s field. Over a hundred people were present when McCormick arrived, all curious to see what could be done with the complicated-looking machine. Many of them were harvesters themselves, and none too eager to see a mechanical device enter into competition for their work. The field was hilly and rough, and the reaper careened about in it like a ship in a gale. The farmer grew indignant, and protested that McCormick would ruin all his wheat, and the laborers began to jeer and joke at the machine’s expense. The exhibition gave every sign of proving a failure when one of the spectators called out that he owned the next field and would be glad to give McCormick a chance there. This field was level, and the young man quickly turned his reaper into it. Before sunset he had cut six acres of wheat, and convinced his audience that his machine was a great improvement over the old method. That evening he drove the reaper to the court-house square and explained its working to the towns people. Very few of them saw how it was to revolutionize the farmer’s labor, but one or two did. Professor Bradshaw, of the local academy, studied the machine, and then stated publicly that in his opinion, “This machine is worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

But if Cyrus McCormick had been fortunate in growing up on a farm where he could study the problem of cutting grain at first hand he was now to find that he was not so fortunate when it came to building other reapers and marketing them. His home was four days’ travel from Richmond. He must have money to get the iron for his machines, to advertise, and to pay agents to try to sell them. He had very little money. He did advertise in the Lexington Union in September, 1833, offering reapers for sale at fifty dollars; but there were no answers to his advertisements. So skeptical were the farmers that it was seven years before one bought a reaper of him. But he had faith enough in his invention to take out a patent on it in 1834.

Until now McCormick had depended on the farm for his livelihood, but there was little profit in this, and he turned his attention to a deposit of iron ore in the neighborhood, and built a furnace and began to make iron. This succeeded until the panic of 1837 reached the Virginia country and brought debt and lowered prices with it. Cyrus surrendered his farm and what other property he had to his creditors. None of them was sufficiently interested in the crude reaper to consider it worth taking.

But the inventor hung on to his faith in this machine, although no one appeared to buy it, and the expense he had gone to in making it had practically bankrupted him. And his faith met with its reward, for one day in 1840 a stranger rode up to the door of his workshop and offered fifty dollars for a reaper. He had seen one of the machines on exhibition, and had decided to try it. A little later two other farmers who lived on the James River appeared and gave McCormick two more orders. He had the satisfaction of knowing that in the harvest of 1840 three of his reapers were having a trying out.

The next year he was busy trying to perfect a blade that would cut wet grain. This took him weeks of experimenting, but at last he found that a serrated edge of a certain pattern would produce the effect he wanted. He added this to the new machines he was building, fixed the price of the reaper at one hundred dollars, and in 1842 sold seven machines, in 1843 twenty-nine, and in 1844 fifty. At last he had justified himself, and the log workshop had become a busy factory.

An invention of such great value to the farmer naturally advertised itself through the country districts. Men who heard of a machine that would cut one hundred and seventy-five acres of wheat in less than eight days—as happened in one case—naturally decided that it was worth investigating. And those who already owned machines saw a chance to make money by selling to their neighbors. One man paid McCormick $1,333 for the reaper agency of eight counties, another $500 for the right in five other counties, and a business man offered $2,500 for the agency in southern Virginia. Meantime orders were coming in from the distant states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, and the little home factory was being pushed to the utmost.

But it was not only difficult to obtain the necessary materials for building reapers on the remote Virginia farm, it was almost impossible to ship the machines ordered in time for the harvests. Those that went west had to be taken by wagon to Scottsville, sent down the canal to Richmond, put on shipboard for the long journey down the James River to the Atlantic and so by ocean to New Orleans, changed there to a river steamer that should take them up the Mississippi and by the Ohio River to the distributing point of Cincinnati. Many delays might happen in such a long trip, and many delays did happen, and in several cases the reapers did not reach the farmers who had ordered them until long after the harvesting season was over. McCormick saw that he must build his reapers in a more central place.

At that time labor was very scarce in the great central region of the country, and the farms were enormous. The wheat was going to waste, for there were not enough scythes and sickles to cut it. McCormick started on a trip through the middle West, and what he saw convinced him that his reaper would soon be an absolute necessity on every farm. All he needed was to find the best point for building his machines and shipping them. He studied this matter with the greatest care, and finally decided that the strategic place was the little town of Chicago, situated on one of the Great Lakes, and half-way between the prairies of the West and the commercial depots and factories of the eastern seaboard.

Chicago in 1847 was still little more than a frontier town. It had fought gamely with floods and droughts, with cholera and panics, with desperadoes and with land thieves. But men saw that it was bound to grow, for railroads would have to come to bring the wheat and others to carry it away, and that meant that some day it would be a great metropolis. McCormick, like most of the other business builders who were streaming into Chicago, only wanted credit to enable him to build and sell his goods, and he was fortunate enough to find a rich and prominent citizen named William B. Ogden, who was ready to give him credit and enter into partnership with him.

Ogden gave McCormick $25,000 for a half interest in the business of making reapers, and started at once to build a factory. At last the inventor was firmly established. He arranged to sell five hundred reapers for the harvest of 1848, and as one after another was sent out into the great wheat belts and set up and tried, the farmers who saw them decided that the reapers spelled prosperity for them. The business grew, and at the end of two years, when the partners found it wiser to dissolve their firm, McCormick was able to tell Ogden that he would pay him back the $25,000 that he had invested, and give him $25,000 more for interest and profits. Ogden accepted, and McCormick became sole owner of the business.

Cyrus McCormick was not only an inventor, but a business-builder of the rarest talent, one of the great pioneers in a field that was later to be cultivated in the United States to a remarkable degree. He knew he had a machine that would lessen labor and increase wealth wherever wheat was grown, and he felt that it was his mission to see that the reaper should do its share in the progress of the world. In that sense he was more than a mere business man; but in another sense he was a gigantic business-builder. Just as he had studied the problem of cutting wheat with the object of producing the most efficient machine possible, so he now studied the problem of selling his reapers in such a way that every farmer should own one. He believed in liberal advertising, and he had posters printed with a picture of the reaper at the top, and below it a formal guarantee warranting the machine’s performance absolutely. There was a space beneath this for the signature of the farmer who bought, and the agent who sold, and two witnesses. The price of the reaper was one hundred and twenty dollars, and the buyer paid down thirty dollars, and the balance at the end of six months, provided the reaper would cut one and a half acres an hour, and fulfil the other requirements. This guarantee, with a chance to obtain the money back if the purchase was unsatisfactory, was a new idea, and appealed to every one as a most sincere and honorable way of doing business. More than this, he sold for a fixed price, which was in many respects a new method of selling, and he printed in newspapers and farm journals letters he had received from farmers telling of their satisfaction with the reaper. In these new ways he laid the foundation of an enormous business.

The rush to the gold fields of California in 1849 and the resulting settlement of the far western country made Chicago even more central than it had been before. But, although the advertisements of the McCormick reaper were scattered everywhere, many farmers would put off buying until the harvesting season had almost come, and when it was too late to get the machines from the central factory. Therefore McCormick had agents and built warehouses in every farming district, and these agents were given a free rein in their own locality, their instructions being to see that every farmer who needed a reaper was given the easiest opportunity to get one. The price was a fixed one, but McCormick was patient with the purchasers. He gave them a chance to pay for the reapers with the proceeds of their harvests. He held that it was better that he should wait for the money than that the farmers should lack the machines that would enable them to make the most of their fields of grain. “I have never yet sued a farmer for the price of a reaper,” he stated in 1848, and he held to that policy as steadfastly as he could. As a result he soon gained the farmers’ confidence, and his name became identified with square, and even with lenient, dealing with all classes of purchasers. He lost little by it, and in the long run the wide-spread advertising of this policy of business proved an invaluable asset.

It is not to be supposed that no rival reapers were put upon the market. Many were, and to meet some of these McCormick made use of what became known as the Field Test. He would instruct his agents to issue invitations to his rivals to meet him in competition. Then the different makes of reapers would show how many acres of grain they could cut in an afternoon before an audience of the neighboring farmers. Judges were appointed to decide as to the merits of the different machines, and in most of the tests McCormick’s reaper outdistanced all its rivals. In one such meeting it is said that forty machines competed. Such shows were the best possible form of advertising, but in time they degenerated into absurd performances. Trick machines of unwieldy strength were built secretly, and reapers were driven into growths of young trees, and were fastened together and then pulled apart to prove which was the stronger. At last it was realized that the field tests were no longer fair, and McCormick gave them up.

So important an invention as the reaper was certain to have many improvements made to it. For a number of years, however, the only additions that were made to the original model were seats for the driver and raker. The machine did the work of the original man with the sickle or scythe and that of the cradler, and having cut the grain left it in loose piles on the ground. But it still had to be raked up and bound, and a number of inventors were busy trying to perfect mechanical devices that would do this work too. A man named Jearum Atkins invented a contrivance that was called the “Iron Man,” which was a post fastened to the reaper, having two iron arms that swept round and round and brushed the grain from the platform as fast as it was cut and had fallen. This plan was very clumsy, but improvements were made so rapidly that by 1860 the market was filled with various patterns of self-raking reapers.

The problem of binding the grain was more difficult. This had always been hard labor, taking a great deal of time and requiring three or four men to every reaper. The first step toward a self-binder was the addition of a foot-board at the back of the reaper, on which a man might stand and fasten the grain into sheaves as it fell. This was a little better than the old method, but only a little. It took less time, but it was still very hard and slow work.

McCormick was deep in a study of this matter when one day a man named James Withington came to him from Wisconsin, and announced that he had a machine that could automatically bind grain. McCormick had been working night and day over his own plan, and when the inventor began to explain he fell asleep. When he woke, Withington had left. McCormick at once sent one of his men to the inventor’s Wisconsin home, and, with many apologies, begged him to come back. Withington did, and showed McCormick a wonderful machine, one made of two arms of steel that would catch each bundle of grain, pass a wire about it and twist the ends of the wire, cut it loose, and throw it to the ground. Here was an invention that would more than double the usefulness of the reaper, and one that seems quite as remarkable as the reaper itself. McCormick at once contracted with Withington for this binder, and tried it on an Illinois farm the following July. It worked perfectly, cutting fifty acres of grain and binding it into sheaves. At last only one person was needed to harvest the wheat, the one who sat upon the driver’s seat and simply had to guide the horses. A small boy or girl could do all the work that it had taken a score of men to accomplish twenty years before.

Now it seemed as if the reaper was complete, and nothing could be added to increase its efficiency. McCormick had seen to it that the whirr of his machine was heard in every wheat field of the United States, and was busily extending the reign of the reaper to the great grain districts of Russia, India, and South America. Then, in the spring of 1880, William Deering built and sold 3,000 self-binding machines that used twine instead of wire to fasten the sheaves, and as the news of this novelty spread the farmers declared that the wire of the old binders had cut their hands, had torn their wheat, had proved hard to manage in the flour-mills, and that henceforth they must have twine-binders.

McCormick realized that he must give the farmers what they demanded, and he looked about for a man who could invent a new method of binding with twine. He found him in Marquis L. Gorham, who perfected a new twine-binder, and added a device by which all the sheaves bound were turned out in uniform size. By the next year McCormick was pushing his Gorham binder on the market, and the farmers who had wavered in their allegience to his reaper were returning to the McCormick fold.

The battle of rival reapers had been long and costly. From the building of his factory in Chicago McCormick had been engaged in continuous lawsuits with competitors. His original patent had expired in 1848, and he had used every effort to have it extended. The battle was fought through the lower courts, through the Supreme Court, and in Congress. The greatest lawyers of the time were retained on one side of the reaper struggle or the other. His rivals combined and raised a great fund to defeat his claims. He spent a fortune, but his patents were not renewed, and competition was thrown wide open. With the invention of the twine-binder the patent war burst out afresh, and again the courts were called upon for decisions between the rivals. But by now the competition had become so keen and the cost of manufacturing so heavy that the field dwindled quickly. When the war over the twine-binder ended there were only twenty-two competing firms left; before that there had been over a hundred.

The reaper had been primarily necessary in America, because here farm labor was very scarce, and the wheat fields enormously productive. In fact the growth of the newly opened Western country must have been indefinitely retarded if men had had to cut the grain by hand and harvest it in the primitive manner. The reaper was a very vital factor in the development of that country, and McCormick deserved the credit of being one of the greatest profit-builders of the land.

In Europe and Asia labor was plentiful, and the reaper had to win its way more slowly. McCormick showed his machine at the great international exhibitions and gradually induced the large landowners to consider it. Practical demonstration proved its value, and it made its appearance in the fields of European Russia and Siberia, in Germany and France and the Slavic countries, in India, Australia, and the Argentine, and at last wherever wheat was to be cut. It trebled the output of grain, and the welfare of the people has proven largely dependent on their food supply. It has been an invention of the greatest economic value to the world.

XII
HOWE AND THE SEWING-MACHINE
1819-1867

The needs of his times, and of the people among whom he lives, have often set the inventor’s mind working along the line of his achievement. It was so with Elias Howe, who built the first sewing-machine. A hard-working man, and not overstrong, he would return to his home from the machine-shop where he was employed, and throw himself on the bed night after night to rest. Each night he watched his young wife sewing to clothe their three children and add a little something to the family income. With a strong taste for mechanics it was natural that he should wonder if there were not some way of lightening the burden of so much needlework.

He had been brought up in surroundings that naturally impressed him with the value of looms and new appliances for spinning and weaving. He understood the various processes of handling wool and cotton, although his own work lay outside them. His father had been a miller in the small Massachusetts town of Spencer, where Elias was born in 1819. New England was already building her textile factories, and when he was only six the boy joined his brothers and sisters at the work of sticking wire teeth through the straps of leather that were then used for cotton-cards. What he learned from books he had to pick up during a few weeks each summer at the district school. His health was delicate, and he was lame, unfitted to be a farmer, and his best place seemed to be in his father’s mill. But he was ambitious, and when he was sixteen, a friend having brought him glowing tales of the great cotton-mills in the fast-growing city of Lowell, he decided to seek his fortune there. The panic of 1837 closed the mills, and Howe found his course deflected to work in a machine-shop in Cambridge. By the time he came of age he had married and was living in Boston, working as a mechanic to support his family. Of a speculative turn of mind, he was constantly suggesting improvements at the shop, and his watching his wife labor with needle and thread turned his thoughts in the direction of a machine for sewing.

The idea was not a new one, but the men who had studied it had decided that there were too many difficulties to overcome. Howe took up the matter as a pastime, giving his spare moments to it, and talking it over with his wife in the evenings when he was not too tired. Naturally enough what he tried to do was to imitate the action of the hand in sewing. His idea was to make a machine that would thrust a needle through the cloth and then push it back again, working up and down. Therefore his first needle was sharp at both ends, and had its eye in the middle. He decided that he could only use very coarse thread, as the constant motion would surely snap any fine thread. But a year’s experimenting convinced him that this simple up-and-down thrust was too primitive a motion, and that the needle must be made to form a different sort of stitch. He tried one method after another, and finally hit upon the idea of making use of two threads, and forming the stitch by means of a shuttle and a curved needle having the eye near the point. He made a model, in wood and wire, of this first sewing-machine, in October, 1844, and found that it would work.

An early account of Howe’s first sewing-machine says, “He used a needle and a shuttle of novel construction, and combined them with holding surfaces, feed mechanism, and other devices as they had never before been brought together in one machine.... One of the principal features of Mr. Howe’s invention is the combination of a grooved needle having an eye near its point, and vibrating in the direction of its length, with a side-pointed shuttle for effecting a locked stitch, and forming with the threads, one on each side of the cloth, a firm and lasting seam not easily ripped.”

Howe had now decided to give all his time to introducing his sewing-machine. He gave up his position in the machine-shop, and moved his family to his father’s house in Cambridge. There his father was employed in cutting palm-leaf for the manufacture of hats. The son had a lathe put in the garret, and began to make the various parts that were needed for his sewing-machine. He did any work he could find by the day to supply his family with food and clothing, but it proved a very hard battle. His father’s shop burned, and the whole family seemed on the brink of ruin. The young inventor was in a very difficult situation. He was confident that he had a machine that should, if properly handled, bring him in a fortune, but he must have some money to buy the iron and steel that were essential to its building, and he must devise a way of interesting some capitalist in it sufficiently to enable him to put it on the market. Meantime he must contrive to provide for his family, who were now practically without shelter.

Fortunately, at this point, a Cambridge dealer in coal and wood, by the name of Fisher, heard of Howe’s machine, and asked to see it. Howe jumped at the opportunity, explained its mechanism, and told how he was situated. Mr. Fisher thought the model had possibilities, and agreed to provide board for the inventor and his family, to give the young man a workshop in his own house, and to advance him the sum of $500, which Howe said was absolutely necessary to pay for the construction of such a machine as could be shown to the public. For his assistance Fisher was to receive a half-interest in a patent for the sewing-machine if Howe could obtain one. This arrangement proved Howe’s salvation, and in December, 1844, he moved into his new friend’s house.

He worked all that winter, meeting the many practical difficulties that arose as he progressed with his machine, and devising solutions for overcoming each. He worked all day, and many a time long into the night. His machine progressed so well that by April, 1845, he found that it would sew a seam four yards long. The machine was entirely completed by the latter part of May, and its work proved satisfactory to both partners. Howe sewed the seams of two woolen suits with it, one for himself, and one for Fisher, and it was declared that the mechanical sewing was so well done that it promised to outlast the cloth. There was no longer any doubt that Howe had invented a machine that would lighten labor to a very great degree.

He took out his first patent on the sewing-machine toward the end of 1845. But when he tried to introduce his invention he met the same difficulties that had faced all men who tried to supplant hand labor by any mechanical process. The tailors of Boston to whom he showed it were willing to admit its efficiency, but told him that he could never secure its general use, as such a proceeding would ruin their business. Every one admired the sewing-machine and praised Howe’s ingenuity, but no one would buy one. The opposition to the completed machine seemed insuperable, and Fisher, believing it to be so, at length withdrew from his partnership with Howe. The latter and his family had to move back again to his father’s house.

To make a living Howe took a position as a locomotive engineer, leaving his invention unused at home. This work proved too hard, his health broke down, and he was compelled to give up the position. In his enforced idleness he began to devise new ways of selling his machine, and finally decided to send his brother Amasa to England, and see if he could not interest some one there in the invention. His brother was willing to do this, and arrived in London, with a sewing-machine, in October, 1846. He showed it to a man named William Thomas, who became interested in it, offered $1,250 for it, and also offered to employ Elias Howe in his business of umbrella and corset maker.

Howe decided that this position was preferable to his idleness in Cambridge, and accepted it. He sailed for England, and entered the factory of William Thomas. But, although Thomas had taken a very lively interest in Howe’s sewing-machine, he did not treat the inventor well. For eight months Howe worked for him, and meantime he had sent for his wife and three children, and they had arrived in London. But eight months was the limit of his endurance of his new master’s tyranny, and at the end of that time he gave up his position. Matters seemed tending worse and worse with him, and the situation of the Howe family in London, almost penniless, grew daily more and more precarious.

His family at home sent Howe a little money before his earnings were entirely spent, and he used this to buy passage for his wife and children back to the United States. He himself stayed in London, believing there were better chances for the sale of his machine there than in America. But his pursuit of fortune in England proved but the search for the rainbow’s pot of gold. There was no market for his wares, and after months of actual destitution he pawned the model of his sewing-machine and even his patent papers in order to secure funds to pay his passage home. Tragedy dogged his footsteps. He reached New York with only a few small coins in his pocket, and received word that his wife was lying desperately ill in Cambridge. His own strength was spent, and he had to wait several days before he had the money to pay his railroad fare to Boston. Soon after he reached home his wife died. Blow after blow had fallen on him until he was almost crushed.

Even his hard-won invention seemed now about to be snatched from him. Certain mechanics in New England, who had heard descriptions of his model, built machines on its lines, and sold them. The newspapers learned of these, and began to suggest their use in a number of industries. Howe looked about him, saw the sewing-machine growing in favor, heard it praised, and realized that it had been actually stolen from him. He bestirred himself, found patent attorneys who were willing to look into his patents, and when they pronounced them unassailable, found money enough to defend them. He began several suits to establish his claims in August, 1850, and at about the same time formed a partnership with a New Yorker named Bliss, who agreed to try to sell the machines if Howe would open a shop and build them in New York.

Howe’s claims to the invention of the sewing-machine were positively established by the courts in 1854. The machine was now well known, and its value as a moneymaker very apparent. But the workers in cheap clothing shops organized to prevent the introduction of the machines, claiming that they would destroy their livelihood. Labor leaders took up the slogan, and led the men and women workers in what were known as the Sewing-machine Riots. In the few shops where the machines were actually introduced they were injured or destroyed by the workmen. The pressure became so great that the larger establishments ceased their use, and only the small shops, that employed a few workers, were able to continue using the new machine. In spite of its recognized value it looked as if the sewing-machine could not prove a financial success, and when Howe’s partner Bliss died in 1855 the inventor was able to buy his share in the business from his heirs for a very small sum.

Opposition, even of the most strenuous order, has never been able to retard for long the use of an invention that simplifies industry. If a machine is made that will in an hour do the work that formerly required several days’ hand labor that machine is certain to displace that hand labor. The workers may protest, but industrial progress demands the more economic method. So it was with the sewing-machine. The riots died away, the labor leaders turned to other fields, and one by one the clothing factories installed the new machines. Howe had the patience to wait, and in one way and another obtained the sinews of war to sue the infringers of his patents. The waiting was worth while. He ultimately forced all other manufacturers of sewing-machines to pay him for their products. In six years his royalties increased from $300 a year to over $200,000 a year. His machine was shown at the Paris Exposition of 1867, and was awarded a gold medal, and Howe himself was given the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor.

The wheel of fortune has turned quickly for many inventors, but perhaps never more completely than it did for Elias Howe. The man who had pawned his goods in London, and had reached New York with less than a dollar in his pocket, had an income of $200,000 a year. He who had been rebuffed by the tailors of Boston was recognized as one of the great men of his generation, and one who, instead of taking the bread from the mouths of poor working men and women, had lightened their labor a thousandfold. The women, like his own wife, who had sewed by day and night, were saved their strength and vision, and the slavery of the clothing factories, notorious in those days, was inestimably lightened. But it had been a hard fight to make the world take what it sorely needed.

Howe’s struggle had been so hard that his health was badly broken when he did succeed. He had several years to enjoy his profits and honors. He died October 3, 1867, at his home in Brooklyn.

Many inventors have barely escaped with their lives from the fury of mobs who thought the inventor would take their living from them. Papin, and Hargreaves, and Arkwright all learned what such resistance meant. But as one invention has succeeded another people have grown wiser, and realized that each has conferred a benefit rather than taken away a right. Howe was one of the last to find the people he hoped to benefit aligned against him. The world has moved, since Galileo’s day, and the inventor is now known as the great benefactor. But Howe’s life was a fight, and his triumph that of one of the great martyrs of invention.

XIII
BELL AND THE TELEPHONE
1847-

None of the inventions that have resulted from the study of electricity have been stumbled upon in the dark. Scientists in both England and America had realized the possibility of the telegraph before Morse built his first working outfit in his rooms on Washington Square. Edison took out a patent covering wireless telegraphy before Marconi gave his name to the new means of communication. Often a man who has been following one trail through this new field has come upon another, glanced down it, and decided to go back and explore it more thoroughly another day. Meantime the trail is run down by a rival. The prize has gone to that persevering one who has made that trail his own, and learned its secret while other men were only glancing at it. Alexander Graham Bell was by no means the first man to realize that the sound of the human voice could be sent over a wire. He did not happen to stumble upon this fact. He worked it out bit by bit, from what other men had already learned concerning electricity, and his object was to make the telephone of real use to the world. It so happened that Elisha Gray and Bell each filed a claim upon the telephone at the Patent Office on the same day, February 14, 1876. But it was Bell who was able to place the first telephone at the public’s service.

He came of a family that had long been interested in the study of speech. His father, his grandfather, his uncle, and two brothers had all taught elocution in one form or another at the Universities of Edinburgh, Dublin, and London. His grandfather had worked out a successful system to correct stammering, his father, widely known as a splendid elocutionist, had invented a sign-language that he called “Visible Speech,” which was of help to those learning foreign tongues, and also a system to enable the deaf to read spoken words by the movements of the lips. Naturally enough the young inventor started with a very considerable knowledge of the laws of sound.

Bell was born in Edinburgh March 1, 1847, and educated there and in London. When he was sixteen family influence was able to get him the post of teacher of elocution in certain schools, and he spent his leisure hours studying the science of sound. Soon after he came of age he met two well-known Englishmen who were experts in his line of study, Sir Charles Wheatstone and Alexander J. Ellis. Ellis had translated Helmholtz’s celebrated book on “The Sensations of Tone,” and was able to show Bell in his own laboratory how the German scientist had succeeded in keeping tuning-forks in vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and had blended the tones of several tuning-forks so as to produce approximately the sound of the human voice. This idea was new to Bell, and led him to wonder whether it would not be possible to construct what might be called a musical telegraph, sending different notes over a wire by electro-magnetism, using a piano keyboard to give the different notes.

Sir Charles Wheatstone, the leading English authority on the telegraph, received young Bell with the greatest interest, and showed him a new talking-machine that had been constructed by Baron de Kempelin. Bell studied this closely, discussed it with Wheatstone, and decided that he would devote himself to the problems of reproducing sounds mechanically.

The course of his life was then suddenly altered. His two brothers died in Edinburgh of consumption, and he was told that he must seek a change of climate. Accordingly his father and mother sailed with him to the town of Brantford in Canada. There he at once became interested in teaching his father’s system of “Visible Speech” to a tribe of Mohawk Indians in the neighborhood.

He had already had very considerable success in teaching deaf-mutes to talk by visible speech, or sign-language, and this success was repeated in Canada. Word of it went to Boston, and as a result the Board of Education of that city wrote to him, offering to pay him five hundred dollars if he would teach his system in a school for deaf-mutes there. He was glad to accept, and in 1871 moved to Boston, which he planned to make his permanent residence.

Success crowned his teaching almost immediately. Boston University offered him a professorship, and he opened a “School of Vocal Physiology,” which paid him well. Most of his remarkable skill in teaching the deaf and dumb to understand spoken words and in a manner to speak themselves was due to his father’s system, which he had carefully followed, and had in some respects improved upon.

At this time a resident of Salem, Thomas Sanders, engaged the young teacher to train his small deaf-mute son, and asked him to make his home at Sanders’ house in Salem. As he could easily reach Boston from there Bell consented, and in the cellar of Mr. Sanders’ house he set up a workshop, where for three years he experimented with tuning-forks and electric batteries along the line of his early studies in London.

At nearly the same time Miss Mabel Hubbard came to him to be taught his system of speech. He became engaged to her, and some years later they were married.

His future wife’s father was a well-known Boston lawyer, Gardiner G. Hubbard. It is related that one evening as Bell sat at the piano in Mr. Hubbard’s home in Cambridge, he said, “Do you know that if I sing the note G close to the strings of the piano, the G-string will answer me?” “What of it?” asked Mr. Hubbard. “Why, it means that some day we ought to have a musical telegraph, that will send as many messages simultaneously over one wire as there are notes on the piano.”

Bell knew the field of his work in a general way, but he had not yet decided which path to choose of several that looked as if they might lead across it. His far-distant goal was to construct a machine that would carry, not the dots and dashes of the telegraph, but the complex vibrations of the human voice. This would be much more difficult to attain than a musical telegraph, and for some time he wavered between the two ideas. His work with his deaf and dumb pupils was all in the line of making sound vibrations visible to the eye. He knew that with what was called the phonautograph he could get tracings of such sound vibrations upon blackened paper by means of a pencil or marker attached to a vibrating cord or membrane, and furthermore that he could obtain tracings of certain vowel sound vibrations upon smoked glass. He studied the effect of vibrations upon the bones of the ear, and this led him to experiment with vibrating a thin piece of iron before an electro-magnet.

His study of the effect of vibrations on the human eardrum showed Bell what path he should follow. Sound waves striking the delicate ear-drum could send thrills through the heavier bones inside the ear. He thought that if he could construct two iron discs, which should be similar to the ear-drums, and connect them by an electrified wire, he might be able to make the disc at one end vibrate with sound waves, send those vibrations through the wire to the other disc, and have that give out the vibrations again in the form of sounds. That now became his working idea, and it was the principle on which the telephone was ultimately to be built.

But Bell had been giving so much time and attention to this absorbing project that his teaching had suffered. His “School of Vocal Physiology” had had to be abandoned, and he found that his only pupils were Miss Hubbard and small George Sanders. Both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Hubbard, who had been helping him with the cost of his experiments, refused to do so any longer unless he would devote himself to working out his musical telegraph, in which both had a great deal of faith as a successful business proposition.

While he was struggling with these distracting calls of duty and science he was obliged to go to Washington to see his patent attorney. There he determined to call upon Professor Joseph Henry, who was the greatest American authority on electrical science, and who had experimented with the telegraph in the early years of the century. Bell, aged twenty-eight, explained his new idea to Henry, then aged seventy-eight. The theory was new to Henry, but he saw at once that it had tremendous possibilities. He told Bell so. “But,” said Bell, “I have not the expert knowledge of electricity that is needed.” “You can get it,” answered Henry. “You must, for you are in possession of the germ of a great invention.”

Those few words, coming from such a man, were of the greatest possible encouragement to Bell. He returned home, determined to get the knowledge of electricity he needed, and to carry on his work with the telephone.

He rented a room at 109 Court Street, Boston, for a workshop, and took a bedroom in the neighborhood. He studied electricity night and day, and he gave equal time to the musical telegraph that his friends favored and to the invention that now claimed his real interest.

The man from whom Bell rented his workshop was Charles Williams, himself a manufacturer of electrical supplies. Bell had for his assistant Thomas A. Watson, who helped him construct the two armatures, or vibrating discs, at the end of an electrified wire that stretched from the workshop to an adjoining room. Watson was working with Bell on an afternoon in June, 1875. Bell was in the workshop, and Watson in the next room. Bell was stooping down over the instrument at his end of the wire. Suddenly he gave an exclamation. He had heard a faint twang come from the disc in front of him.

He dashed into the next room. “Snap that reed again, Watson,” he commanded. Back at his own end of the wire he waited. In a minute he caught the light twang again. It was only what he had been expecting to hear at any time during the months of his work, but nevertheless he was amazed when he did catch the sound. It proved that a sound could be carried over a wire, and accurately reproduced at the farther end. And that meant that the vibrations of the human voice could ultimately be sent in the same way.

Bell’s enthusiasm had already converted his assistant, Watson; it now won over Hubbard and Sanders. They began to believe that there might be something of real value in his strange scheme, and offered to help him finance it. He went on with his studies in electricity, and gradually began to learn how he could make it serve him best.

But it was a far cry from that first faint sound to the actual transmission of words. For a long time his receiving instruments would only give out vague rumbling noises. In November, 1875, his experiments showed him that the vibrations created in a reed by the human voice could be transmitted in such a way as to reproduce words and sounds. Then, in January, 1876, he showed a few of the pupils at Monroe’s School of Oratory in Boston an apparatus by which singing could be carried more or less satisfactorily from the cellar of the building to a room on the fourth floor. But on March 10, 1876, the new instrument actually talked. Watson, who was at the basement end of the wire, heard the disc say, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” He dashed up the three flights of stairs to the room in which Bell was. “I can hear you!” he cried. “I can hear the words!”

“Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” Bell is reported to have said, “I would never have invented the telephone.” He had come upon his discovery by the right path, but it was a path that very few men could ever have picked out. Other inventors had tried to make a machine that would carry the voice, but they had all worked from the standpoint of the telegraph. Bell, inheriting unusual knowledge of the laws of speech and sound, came from the other direction. He started with the laws of sound transmission rather than with the laws of the telegraph. The result was that he had created something altogether new, basically different from all the other inventions that made use of electricity, for which there was as yet no common name even, and which he described in his application for a patent, as “an improvement in telegraphy.”

Only two months after the day on which the telephone had actually talked for the first time the Centennial Exposition opened in Philadelphia. Mr. Hubbard was one of the Commissioners, and he obtained permission to have Bell’s first telephone placed on a small table in the Department of Education. Bell himself was too poor to be able to go to Philadelphia, and intended to stay in Boston, and try to find new deaf-mute pupils. But when Miss Hubbard left for the Centennial, and begged him to go with her, he could not resist. He stayed on the train, without a ticket, without baggage, and reached Philadelphia with the Hubbards.