![]() ![]() Within two years the new McCormick Works replaced the old factory. Within days Nettie Fowler McCormick, the young wife of 62-year-old Cyrus, was on the new site, where she ordered the resumption of full production. Put the whole future of the company into question when, on October 9, it destroyed the entire old factory. On January 25, 1871, Cyrus McCormick bought 130 acres on the South Branch of the Chicago River, where he hoped to build a new factory. ![]() As a result, McCormick had shrunk to a regional firm, selling principally in upper Midwest states. McCormick harvesters also technically lagged behind specialized self-rakes used for harvesting small grains. Its products were ill-suited to a shift among many farmers to combined machines that could efficiently harvest both grain and hay, the latter much in demand to feed the livestock in America's burgeoning cities. In 1860, his factory occupied 110,000 square feet of floor space and, with more than 300 workers, employed nearly a fifth of all wage earners in Chicago's agricultural implement sector.ĭuring the next decade employment in the sector grew quickly-the 1870 Census found nearly 4,000 working in agricultural machinery establishments-but the McCormick Company, though still the largest single employer in the Chicago implement industry, had stagnated. But the sharp financial panic of October 1857 destroyed or crippled many of McCormick's competitors. Wright, who made a self-rake reaper developed by Jearum Atkins. census reported 646 people working in the agricultural implement industry in Chicago.Ĭhicago soon attracted other machinery producers, including George Easterly of Heart Prairie, Wisconsin, who built a Chicago factory to produce his grain header, and John S. By 1850, with the McCormick factory in full operation, the U.S. The two immediately began construction of a factory to build the McCormick reaper. Of Chicago), bought three lots on the north bank of the On August 30, 1847, McCormick, in partnership with Charles M. Link to the East about to be in place, offered the best location from which to build his McCormick also recognized that the future of American agriculture lay to the West and that Chicago, with the This approach had worked poorly, often producing inferior machines and always producing inferior financial results. Since developing the first successful reaper in 1831, McCormick had tried selling it through regional licensees who also manufactured the machine. It makes me wonder just how many other inventions and forms of technology were lost during that time, and if they have all been recreated or we are still waiting to reinvent something.In 1847, Cyrus McCormick decided to consolidate manufacture of his reaper in Chicago. I had never read before that the Romans' first mechanical reaper technology had been lost. I admire those farmers who, even today, still reap crops by hand. While mechanical reapers do save a lot of time, they also can have a great margin of error. Who is the inventor: Cryus McCormick or Robert Hall McCormick? October 31, - Robert Hall McCormick came up with the basic idea for it, and then Cyrus, his son, improved on that idea and then patented it. ![]() Plus having mechanical reapers takes jobs away from people who might otherwise be able to make a living. And they are the ones who spring back much more quickly. Which might not sound like it matters much, but if you've got a good proportion of predators to pests in your fields, you don't have to worry so much about the pests. The mechanical harvesters not only waste a lot of grain, they are also very destructive to the ecosystem that gets set up in the fields, while harvesting by hand allows the field dwellers time to get away. So, yeah, I think that the mechanical reaper invention didn't deprive that many people of jobs.įebruary 15, - I do as well. Harvesting requires a high level of fitness and skill as well and it usually happens all at once, so harvesters can't go from farm to farm all year. When they aren't used, more people are needed to harvest, but harvesting is only a few days worth of work per year, particularly on farms without many different kinds of crops (and a wide variety usually means different kinds of harvesters anyway, some of which are still people). They increase the amount of farmland each individual farmer can work, which means that more people are required (in theory) to help with other tasks. Cool article, but who really did it? The father or son? A lot of other inventions have had the same questionsįebruary 16, - I can see that argument working with other forms of mechanization, but I think with a harvester it's much more difficult to tell whether they make it more or less difficult to get a job.
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