Hussey and McCormick were ignorant not only of each other’s work but of that of many others. By July Cyrus had succeeded in cutting a patch of oats standing in a neighbor’s field. He was about ready to give up in frustration when Cyrus, then twentytwo, took over, in May of 1831. His father, Robert McCormick, an incurable tinkerer with several inventions to his credit, had struggled with the reaper problem on and off since Cyrus’s birth. He retired to his room to conceal tears of joy.Īt almost the same time, Cyrus McCormick was creating his reaping machine in the blacksmith shop of his family’s twelve-hundred-acre farm, Walnut Grove, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. When he pushed his strange-looking contraption across the board, it succeeded in clipping nearly every straw. Sarah Chenoweth, the seven-year-old daughter of the factory owner, watched him in fascination and remembered him later as “so very gentle in speech and manner that I never knew fear or awe of him.” To simulate a wheat field, Hussey had drilled holes in a large board, which Sarah helped him cover with straws. Hussey’s machine had first seen daylight in 1831, when its modest inventor wheeled a model for it (possibly full-scale) out of a room he had borrowed in a farm-implement factory in Baltimore. The tall, handsome Cyrus McCormick, born in Virginia, was a pioneer Chicagoan, self-confident, bold, and intensely combative. The Maine-born, Quaker-reared Hussey had sailed on a Nantucket whaler and wore a black patch over one eye, the result of an accident, but the piratical look was entirely deceiving: He was the mildest of men, kindhearted, fond of children, and self-effacing. The two inventors presented a study in opposites. Ever since, both had been claiming priority of invention and struggling for commercial dominance in the new field of mechanical harvesting. It had begun when Cyrus McCormick discovered that Obed Hussey had beaten him to the Patent Office with a machine designed to cut standing grain. McCormick and Hussey were on the road with a “great reaper war” that had been raging in the United States for seventeen years. The British press and public were indeed witnessing a strange spectacle, for British inventors and engineers had long dominated agricultural technology.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |