Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 January 1910 — INVENTING A REAPER. [ARTICLE]

INVENTING A REAPER.

Cyrus Hall McCormick, a ScotchIrishman, ranks in history as the man who showed how to conquer the vast prairies of the American West. It is interesting to know that his father, Robert, was an inventor of no mean capacity. In his farm workshops he fashioned an ingenious hempbrake and cleaner to be operated by horse-power. A clover-sheller and a hillside plow were also among his contributions to rural mechanics. _ R. G. Thwaites, the author of “Cyrus Hall McCormick and the Reaper,” says that the son when but 15 years old surpassed the father in* his work upon farming implements. The father’s reaping machine, standing outside the blacksmith shop on the home farm, had been a familiar and alluring spectacle to the boy. His imagination was early fired with & desire to conquer the great practical difficulties of mechanical reaping. When the father acknowledged himself defeated, Cyrus took up the problem on his own account. Later in that same summer of 1831, when but 22 years of age, young McCormick constructed a machine essentially unlike any mechanism proposed by his father or any others who had before under taken the task. He immediately demonstrated by practical tests that the successful type had thus been created; and he never departed from that type, in conformity wherewith all success in this art has since proceeded. The grain supply of the world was then being gathered by hand, with no better Implement than the sickle and the cradle, when, In the harvest of 1831, young Cyrus Hall McCormick entered a Held on Walnut Grove farm and demonstrated to his delighted father that he had at last established the correct principle of cutting. His experimental mechanism was of the rudest sort; but finding that the plan was satisfactory, to use his own words, “I had my machine more completely made, with the addition of a gathering reel, and with a better arranged divider, ready for trial in a neighboring field of late oats, during the same harvest, in which I then cut very successfully six or seven acres of crop.” It is recorded that Robert McCormick declared to a neighbor. "The reaper is a succees, and I belieire that I could not have made It so; but it makes me feel proud to have a son do what I cannot.”