McCormick’s mechanical reaper

The mechanical reaper, created by Cyrus Hall McCormick, combined all the tasks that prior harvesting machines had carried out independently. With the help of his time-saving technology, farmers were able to more than quadruple their crop size, which led to advancements in farm equipment.

Once his father saw the wheat mechanical reaper had a lot of promise, he filed a patent for it. Unfortunately, despite spending 28 years perfecting the reaper, Robert McCormick was unable to release a functional version of it after filing for a patent. From this point on, Cyrus McCormick took over the remaining work and, with the aid of an African slave named Jo Anderson, constructed a reaper that was entirely functioning.

After Obed Hussey declared in 1833 that he was building his own reaper, McCormick patents his design in 1834 and begins producing the machine on the family farm in 1837. Six years later, he started to provide licenses for its production in other regions of the nation. He established a factory in Chicago in 1874, starting what would later grow to be one of the biggest industrial complexes in the United States.

He submitted more patent applications quickly after the innovation and helped with promotion and sales. In Virginia in 1831, he gave the reaper its first public demonstration. Nobody anticipated the business would expand despite competition and legal patent concerns, but this was a tremendous accomplishment in the realm of agriculture.

In 1837, Cyrus's family's iron factory went bankrupt, leaving them with a mountain of debt to settle. After the reaper's initial demonstration was a success, Cyrus McCormick established a production facility, worked on enhancements, and started conducting commercial sales. His new company began to slowly gain traction once he sold his first mechanical reaper in the market in 1840.