Why is cyrus mccormick famous

His father, Robert McCormick, experimented with a design for a mechanical reaper from around the time of Cyrus' birth. In he abandoned the idea and turned the work over to his son. Cyrus made several changes to his father's design and successfully demonstrated his reaper at Steele's Tavern, Virginia, in July After a few additional modifications, he patented the invention in During the s Cyrus and his family manufactured and sold reapers out the blacksmith shop at Walnut Grove.

Cyrus also made several trips to the Midwest, demonstrating his reaper and attempting to contract with local manufacturers. By the end of , however, he had sold fewer than machines. There, McCormick developed innovative marketing and distribution techniques that helped make his company a success.

But McCormick wasn't happy about that. He didn't like unions, or workers demanding better pay or shorter hours. So he brought in machinery to take the place of some of the workers. When his workers demanded higher pay, McCormick bribed the mayor and police, and closed the plant. Don't you think that made the strikers mad? Meanwhile, McCormick's father, Robert, was working in the farm's smithy on an invention of his own: a horse-drawn reaping machine.

When Robert McCormick finally gave up on producing a working model, in the early fall of , his son took over the challenge. At that time, grain was harvested by the same manual process that had been used since the dawn of agriculture.

The reapers mowed down the standing grain with a hand-swung scythe, and the binders followed behind them, tying the crop into bales, which were then carted away, usually for storage in barns. Because reaping was a much more painstaking process than sowing, even farmers with land and seed to spare were forced to limit their crop to what they could reap in a given season.

Using his father's incomplete model as a starting point, McCormick sketched out plans for a machine that would automatically cut, thresh, and bundle grain while being pulled through a field by horses. Within six weeks — before the harvest was over — he had built, field-tested, remodelled, and successfully demonstrated the world's first mechanical reaper to the public.

McCormick had singlehandedly increased farms' potential yield at least tenfold, with minimal effort by farmers. Astonishingly, they remained uninterested or at least unconvinced. For nine years, sales for the device were virtually zero. Farmers were leery of change and were put off by a machine that would later be described as a "contraption seemingly a cross between a wheelbarrow, a chariot, and a flying machine.