Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work
Herbert Casson, 1909
A machine that harvested grain by itself was working in 1831, yet for nine years nobody bought one. Herbert Casson tells how Cyrus McCormick turned the invention into a business. You will learn why he started with the worst field, what he promised the farmer, and how he answered every defeat.
Who it is for
For those who have invented something useful and do not know how to sell it, for beginning entrepreneurs, and for anyone curious how the inventor of the reaper built a whole business around it.
Well, that is over. What next?
The Machine Nobody Bought
July 1831, a farm in a mountain valley in Virginia. Twenty-two-year-old Cyrus McCormick hitches a horse to a clumsy wooden machine and drives it into a strip of wheat that has been left standing on purpose. The reel tilts the ears towards the blade, the blade clicks back and forth, and the cut grain falls onto the platform. The reaper, a machine that harvests grain by itself, works.
And then for nine years nobody buys a single one.
Herbert Casson, a journalist, told this story in 1909, for McCormick's centenary. He writes with admiration and hardly argues with his hero. He brushes aside the farmhands who feared losing their wages, and he tells of McCormick's slave, whom McCormick freed well before the war, as an example of his kindness. So the judgements here belong to Casson, and it is worth reading them with that correction in mind.
But the book's main idea is useful today too. According to Casson, McCormick invented not only the reaper but also a way of selling it to people who had never worked with machines and were afraid to risk their harvest. You will see why he started with the worst field, how he got through the years without buyers, why he moved his factory to the muddy settlement of Chicago, what he promised the farmer, and how he answered every defeat.
Start With the Worst Field
McCormick's father, Robert McCormick, had been building a reaper for fifteen years. In 1816 his machine got tangled in the stalks, the neighbours laughed at it for a long time afterwards, and from then on he worked in secret, with the workshop locked. In 1831 his new machine cut the wheat but threw it down in a tangled heap. The father gave up.
The son took up the task from the other end. Earlier inventors built a machine for straight, obedient wheat. Cyrus, in Casson's words, started with the worst: with grain that the wind and rain had flattened and tangled. Such wheat has to be separated first from the wheat that stays standing, so a curved divider appeared on the edge of the blade. Next came a blade that moves back and forth, fingers to hold the stalks, a large reel for the flattened ears, and a platform for the cut grain.
Casson explains why others had failed. They were not farmers but armchair inventors, and they thought the main thing was to cut. But the farmer knew that grain is easy to cut and hard to gather. With grass it is the other way round. The difficulty lay not in the blade but in what happens to the ears after it.
It is like testing a machine not on a dry, sunny day but in a downpour: if it gets through the worst patch, the good ones will get through by themselves. And we often test an idea where it is comfortable: an app on our own phone, a recipe for our own taste, a plan tried on a person who already agrees in advance.
In 1832, near Lexington, the reaper jolted across a hilly field, the owner shouted that it was knocking the ears down, and the farmhands, who saw it as a rival, laughed. A neighbour offered his level field, and by sunset the machine had cut six acres. That evening the father said to his son words that Casson quotes word for word.
What to do: before you polish the idea, find its “flattened wheat”, the hardest case with a real user, and start there.
About the author
Herbert Newton Casson (1869-1951), a journalist of Canadian origin, wrote about American industry and its makers, including books on the history of steel and the reaper. Later he lived in Britain and became known as the author of books on business efficiency.
All books by this author: Herbert Casson
Terms from the book
- Smith
- acres
- patent
- The Times
- Richmond
- Mississippi
- Senate
- Virginia: A state on the east coast of the United States. In the early 19th century it was the country's main wheat state, and it was here, on his father's farm, that McCormick built the first reaper.
- McCormick: Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-1884), an American inventor and industrialist from Virginia, founder of the reaper factory in Chicago. His father, Robert McCormick, also spent many years trying to build such a machine.
- reel: A rotating wheel of slats on the reaper. It tilts and lifts the stalks towards the blade so that the blade cuts them rather than flattening them.
- reaper: A horse-drawn machine that cuts the grain in the field. Before it, grain was reaped with a sickle or cut by hand with a scythe.
- divider: A curved bar on the edge of the reaper's blade. It separates the strip of grain to be cut from the part that stays standing.
- Lexington: A small town in Virginia about thirty kilometres from the McCormicks' farm. In 1832 the first big public demonstration of the reaper took place here.
- panic: Here: the financial crisis of 1837 in the United States, when banks stopped paying out and prices and trade fell.
- Staunton: A town in Virginia not far from the McCormicks' farm. Near it, in 1839, McCormick showed the reaper to the public.
- prairies: Treeless grassland in the centre of North America. The vast wheat fields of Illinois and the neighbouring states grew on the prairies.
- Sheffield: A city in England, famous in the 19th century for its steel.
- Ogden: William Butler Ogden, the first mayor of Chicago and the builder of the city's first railway. In 1847-1849 he was McCormick's partner.
- Hussey: Obed Hussey, a former sailor from Baltimore, inventor of a mower and McCormick's first major rival.
- Great Exhibition: The great industrial exhibition of 1851 in London, held in the Crystal Palace, where countries showed their machines and goods.
- Mechi: John Joseph Mechi, a London businessman and experimental farmer. In 1851 he held a trial of the reaper on his farm outside London.
- yards: An English unit of length, about 0.9 metres.
- Withington: Charles Withington, an inventor from Janesville in Wisconsin, originally a watchmaker. McCormick produced his self-binder, which bound the sheaves with wire, from the mid-1870s.
- self-binder: A reaper that not only cuts the grain but also binds it into sheaves by itself.
- Deering: William Deering, a former textile merchant from Maine and McCormick's main rival. In 1880 he staked almost his whole fortune on a twine self-binder and won.
- twine: A thin, strong cord made of plant fibres.
- Great Chicago Fire: A fire in October 1871 that destroyed a large part of Chicago.
All terms
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