The Inventions Of Cyrus Hall Mccormick

Cyrus Hall McCormick was one of the founding fathers of farm machinery. He changed the agriculture ways with is inventions. Some of his major accomplishments included the reaper, the hillside plow, and a self-sharping plow. His company later joined other companies and then became International Harvester Company. His inventions made him a very wealthy man of the time but that did not come without devastations and trial and error.

Cyrus McCormick was born on February 15 in 1809. He grew up in Rockbridge County Virginia on a farm called Walnut Grove. McCormick was the son or Robert and Mary McCormick and grew up with seven siblings. He attended school at Old Field Elementary School where his education stopped there. When Cyrus was younger he

The reaper was designed to help farmers harvest wheat with less work force having to be put in. The machine worked by using what is called a driver that separates grain from other grains next to it and a blade called a reciprocating blade that would cut the grain that was being held on a reel and then onto a flat place that catches the grain. After several attempts, Cyrus got a patent on his invention. Hard times started when the panic of 1837 caused a lot of unemployment because of fanatical issues. When the business started going down after the panic of 1837, McCormick started working on his invention and ways to improve it. He manufactured his invention at his family’s blacksmith shop but later went on to manufacture in Chicago calling it McCormick and Gray later to be called McCormick Ogden and Co. McCormick had competitors in the invention of farm machinery. One of his main people was Obed Hussey whose machine was very similar but was for cutting grass and not wheat. Cyrus Machine out done Hussey when it came to clearing fields. In 1850 he became well known in the United States for the reaper and outselling by 5,000 a year by everyone who was trying to make the same invention. He became well known around the world and sold a lot of reapers as he went. Cyrus was being awarded prizes for his invention and had become elected to the French Academy of Science. He was being stated as he “done

Cyrus brothers, who also had helped in the business, later joined companies and started the International Harvester Company. That company known for tractors now but back then their horse drawn equipment were most popular. The International Harvester Company combined McCormick’s reaper and it could now do the work of a hundred men with just one person. Before his death, the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 destroyed everything in sight including Cyrus McCormick’s factory. He lost thousands of reapers because of the fire. After the fire, he decided to rebuild and make a larger factory in Chicago. Cyrus McCormick became a very wealthy man and gave some of his earnings to his favorite churches and