Romance of Reaper

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 1 September 1928, Page 29

Romance of Reaper

Influence on Production nTIirN Cyrus ILall McCormick drove his first reaper out ff for a demonstration run before a crowd of sceptical farmers, he little thought of the vast influence it would have Oil the world of agriculture. Most men in his position, after ars ot failure in attempts to market his machine, would have lost heart. McCormick didn’t, however, and his invention revolutionised farming methods. Machinery now plays a big part in modern agriculture, and is becoming more and more an effectual factor in the fight for increased production at a lower comparative cost.

Until Uio reaper was first success- j fully developed in IS3I by McCormick, ' 1 tbe cradle was the most efficient har- ' vesting tool. Work with the cradle, [lough as anyone can vouch for who jas attempted to swing one, is arduous and slow, and it requires much j still and strength to work it efficiently. With this old-time harvesting , tool, even in the hands of a skilled man, two acres of heavy grain was a very sizeable job. Even though the , coining of the reaper meant a new era ia farming in which eventually much of the drudgery was to be eliminated oy power machinery, people in 1831not quite a century ago—did not take Mndly to the new contraption brought out by McCormick. They viewed it with suspicion. Hence, when young McCormick —ho was only twenty-two years old at the time—in the fall of 1831 hitched four horses to his machine which had been built In the old log-cabin blacksmith’s shop on his father's farm near Steele’s Tavern, Va„ and drove into a neighbouring Beld of wheat, a hundred doubting Thomases were there to scoff at the new venture. Unfortunately for McCormick this field was on rough, hilly ground, and the reaper worked badly. It jolted and cut irregularly. The owner of the field, a fellow by name of Ruff, shouted a discouraging and vehement call to cease operations. “Your blankety-blank machine is rattling the heads off my wheat,” the j man shouted, in tones that fitted the ! meaning of his name (Ruff, pro- J nounced "rough.”) Then came the boohoos and guffaws of those who were always ready to ridicule change and improvements. I The idea that something could take : the place of hand power and the slow- j wielding scythe and cradle was beyond j the ken and conception of McCor- j mick’s unsympathetic neighbours. ; Things looked dark, but the darkness i was only a flitting cloud. A handsome man dashed up on horseback. He was a conspicuous politician of his day, William Taylor by name, and owned a field of wheat bordering Ruff’s, where McCormick and his reaper had so ignominiously come to grief. “Pull down the fence and cross over into my field,” he said to McCormick. “I’ll give you a fair chance to try your machine.” This new field was not so hilly, and consequently the new reaper sailed along in fine trim. As a result, in less than half a day the machine had cut six acres of wheat —as much as six men would have done.

Even with the successful trial and demonstration of his new reaper, however, McCormick was beset with obstacles that would have discouraged many a man not so strong and fixed with tenacious purpose. Notable among the obstacles that McCormick had to overcome was a certain fixity of mind that made the farmer of that day loth to give up the old and take up the new and untried. In other words, McCormick had on his hands a job of selling that was almost as big as that of producing the reaper. So big was the selling job, in fact, that for the ten years following that epochal achievement in 1831 when the reaps-r was first successfully operated, in spite of the continual preaching by Mc-

Cormick of the gospel of the reaper, not a single machine was sold. The break of dawn, however came in 1841, when McCormick sold two machines for 100 dollars a piece. The next few years sales slowly increased. The reaper business had started. l-,ea came an order for eight from Cincinnati. It opened McCormick’s eyes. He saw that the time had come to leave the backwoods farm, a hundred miles from a railway; so he set out on horseback for the western prairies.