Agriculture

McCormick Reaper

          Cyrus Hall McCormick (February 15, 1809 - May 13, 1884) was an American inventor who developed the mechanical reaper. Cyrus grew up on his family's 532-acre farm, Walnut Grove, north of Lexington,Virginia. McCormick had little education. His father, Robert McCormick, was a farmer and blacksmith who invented many useful devices to use on his farm. Robert had tried to invent a reaper (a machine that harvests grain), but failed. Cyrus made a horse drawn reaper that had a cutting bar that went back and forth to cut the crop,and a device to push the grain onto the back of the machine. This machine could harvest more grain than five men. The reaper made farming far more efficient, and resulted in a global shift of labor from farmlands to cities.

     Some people think that Cyrus didn't invent the reaper. They believe that his father actually invented the reaper, but gave it to his son as a gift and Cyrus patented the reaper. Others think that his father,Robert, just started the reaper and after he gave up, Cyrus developed on it and made it work.

     Before the harvest in 1831, Cyrus had a public appearence of the reaper. Farmers were uninterested in the reaper for the first nine years.  He got the reaper patented in 1834. In 1841, Cyrus had to move out of his family's blacksmith shop and began making the reaper in a factory in Chicago,Illinois.

     Cyrus first called his company McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. When Cyrus died in Chicago, the company was passed onto his son. It then became part of the International Harvester Corporation in 1902.

     Cyrus won the Gold Metal at the London Crystal Palace Exposition in 1851. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences, "as having done more for agriculture than any other living man."

     Today, much has changed. Their are rarly any horses on a farm or doing work like pulling a reaper ore plowing a field. Nowadays you see huge tractors with hundreds of horsepower and pulling the biggest

machinery you can imagine. There are still tractors today with the McCormick

name.

     The reaper expanded farms when it was introduced. If you owned a McCormick reaper you could harvest twice as much wheat without as much help. Farms doubled in size. Before the reaper, men had to cut the crops down by hand, had to stack it on the wagon and carry it to the barn. The reaper made all this posible with a machine,and it was pulled by horses. Men didn't have to work near as hard as they had to before. This caused less people to depend on farming to eat, because people could make more than they could eat with the new reaper. This freed many people to go to work in factories. This is one example of how the agricultural revolution helped lead to the industrial revolution.

     We see similar things happening today. Equipment companies keep adding new things to their line and inventing new things to make farming easier and more efficient. I don't think we see inventions that have as great an effect on farming as the reaper had. I think that there is a very little chance that someone will invent something as great as the reaper. Farming is very complex today and the technology is so high that there is little left to improve that would have that great of an effect.

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