Biography of Cyrus McCormick, Inventor of the Mechanical Reaper

On June 21, 1834, American inventor and businessman Cyrus McCormick patented his reaping machine. An excerpt from the article:

"Seeds of the Reaper

McCormick's invention would make him prosperous and famous, but he was a religious young man who believed his mission was to help feed the world. For farmers in the early 19th century, harvesting required a large number of laborers. He set out to reduce the number of hands needed for the harvest. He drew on the work of many other people in developing the reaper, including that of his father and Jo Anderson, a man his father enslaved, but he ended up basing his work on principles entirely different from those employed by Robert McCormick.

After 18 months, he came up with a working model. His machine had a vibrating cutting blade, a reel to pull the grain within reach of the blade, and a platform to catch the falling grain. He had succeeded, and he was only 22. The first version was rough—it made such a clatter that people his family enslaved were assigned to walk with the frightened horses to keep them calm—but it clearly worked. He received a patent for his invention in 1834.

Ironically, after he had received the patent, McCormick set aside his invention to focus on his family's iron foundry, which failed in the wake of the bank panic of 1837 and left the family deeply in debt. So he returned to his reaper, setting up production in a shop next to his father's house and focusing on improvements. He finally sold his first machine in 1840 or 1841, and business slowly took off."