An English farm hosted a competition in July 1851 in which McCormick’s reaper bested a British harvest. Many people expressed curiosity about it. McCormick’s latest model was on display at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. The McCormick reapers were capable of not only cutting wheat but also threshing it and putting it in sacks for storage or shipment by the end of the 19th century. As McCormick’s farming equipment product line grew, later models consistently added practical features. Consequently, farms could be much larger, even spanning hundreds of acres.Ī carpenter gathering grain on a platform could do so while walking next to a McCormick reaper. Even a farmer who is exceptionally good at swinging a scythe could only harvest two acres of grain in a day.Īn individual with a horse and reaper could harvest large fields in a single day. In the autumn, corn grain would have to be cut to last families until the next harvest before McCormick’s machinery changed farming forever. The reaper McCormick invented reduced the chances of food shortages or even famine. It allowed farmers to harvest large areas of grain in far less time than they could have with scythes.Īs a result, they planted more wheat. He began selling more of the machine after word of its remarkable capabilities spread. McCormick manufactured more machines, but he first sold them only to farmers.

In this particular year, McCormick was able to use the machine during the fall harvest and the machine worked flawlessly. The only job McCormick had to do was walk alongside the machine and make piles of wheat stalks that could be bound as usual. A horse pulled the device, and suddenly it was evident that the machine was doing all the physical work. The machine was pulled by a horse through a wheat field by McCormick as the demonstration began.

As the stalks were being cut, the blade and spinning parts would keep the grain heads in place. In the description of the demonstration, local farmers were initially puzzled by a strange contraption that resembled a sled topped with a bunch of machinery. It was a machine with some innovative features. With the machine, farmers could harvest grain faster and more efficiently than ever before. McCormick demonstrated the device at Steele’s Tavern, a local gathering spot, once he had figured out the complicated mechanics of it. After about six weeks of labor in the blacksmith shop, the son took up the job. McCormick’s father had earlier attempted to invent a harvesting device but gave up. Mechanical Reaper Experiments In The Early Days

For the sake of making slaves feel less frightened in the presence of horses, enslaved people were forced to walk along with the horses. One of the most annoying features of the machine was its loud clatter, which caused a lot of distractions to my work. It was McCormick’s reaper which was being tested on the farm of a neighbor in 1831 that was initially offered a hopeful perspective, suggesting that labor might no longer be a constraint on the productivity of farming fields. The farmers whose farms were short of hired or enslaved workers in the mid-to-late 1990s would find themselves struggling with insufficient hired or enslaved workers if their crops fluctuated or their labor costs went up during peak demand. The early 19th century was a challenging century for the farmers, as harvesting their crops took a lot of effort. There is no doubt that the reaper represented the principles that would guide all other grains-chopping machines to come. In addition to its two-wheeled, horse-drawn appearance, the machine was equipped with a blade that vibrated a reel that brought the grain within its reach, and a platform that caught the grain falling from the machine. As a 22-year-old Cyrus Koerner, he attempted to construct a reaper in 1831. In addition to his many practical farm implements, the elder McCormick had also tried to build the successful reaping machine, but he had failed just like other inventors both in America and England. MaMechanical Reaper: Invented By Cyrus Mccormick

Who invented mechanical reaper