1/2/2024 0 Comments Mechanical reaper![]() Within six weeks, he successfully demonstrated his machine by harvesting oats at nearby Steele's Tavern.įor many years, Cyrus was acclaimed nationally and internationally as the singular inventor of the reaper. After Robert abandoned the project in 1831, young Cyrus started building a reaper based on a different principle. The traditional story of the McCormick reaper begins with Cyrus' father, Robert McCormick, who had been trying to develop a workable reaper for several years at Walnut Grove, the family's plantation in Rockbridge County, Va. In turn, the mechanization of agriculture accelerated industrialization and urbanization as displaced workers migrated more rapidly from farms to factories. ![]() The reaper broke the harvest-labor bottleneck by allowing the farmer "to reap as much as he could sow." This big step toward automation allowed farms to become larger and more productive. "Of all the inventions during the first half of the nineteenth century which revolutionized agriculture, the reaper was probably the most important," wrote University of Chicago historian William Hutchinson in his two-volume biography of McCormick in the 1930s. McCormick was staking his claim to one of the most important breakthroughs in the mechanization of agriculture. "I would warn all persons against the use of the aforesaid principle," McCormick wrote, "as I regard and treat the use of it, in any way, as an infringement of my right." McCormick immediately wrote a letter to the editor claiming that he had invented a reaper in 1831 based on the same principle as Hussey's machine. ![]() Cyrus McCormick spied his archrival for the first time in the April 1834 issue of Mechanics' Magazine, which published a drawing and description of a mechanized reaping machine patented by Obed Hussey.
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