Robert Bell of Scotland, Obed Hussey and John Manny of the USA are a few inventors working on early reaper designs. It should be noted that other inventors were working on reapers at the time. In 1902, McCormick was merged into the International Harvester Company. It later became the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. At this time the company was called the Cyrus H. Chicago offered cheap transportation for raw materials and easy access to the farms of the US Mid-West which Cyrus had noticed were the farms purchasing his machines. Improvements were made to the design in 1845 and in 1847 Cyrus and a brother moved to Chicago where they established a factory to build reapers. These early machines were built by hand in the plantation workshop. Sales after that time slowly began to pick up. As the machine could not handle variable conditions well, it did not sell.Ĭyrus only sold the first machine in 1840, none in 1841 and another seven in 1842. Cyrus McCormick took over the project in 1830 and with the help of an enslaved African American on the McCormick plantation, Joe Anderson, Cyrus came up with a mechanical reaper. McCormick worked on this idea for the next 28 years but was never able to perfect it into a viable horse drawn machine. His father around 1801 purchased the idea for a mechanical reaper from a blacksmith named McPhetrich. Agriculture was no exception, and people were examining how agriculture could be mechanized.Ĭyrus McCormick was born in 1809 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where his father operated a large farm or plantation at the time.

The years after 1800 saw people becoming more aware of how machines could improve their lives and make them money. The most a single farmer could hope to harvest with a scythe was around 10 acres if the farmer was working by himself.

But this method was laborious and cutting the crop was the limiting factor in grain production. This had the advantage that the stalks of grain were already gathered and so were more easily tied into sheaves. Some scythes were equipped with a lightweight carrier that caught the plants as they were cut. As well sheaves were often carried off to a barn for drying.Īfter drying, threshing could take place either with a fail or a ground hog thresher. Up to that time standing grain had to be cut with a scythe and then gathered by hand to be tied into sheaves and stooked for drying. Cyrus McCormick built and demonstrated a mechanical reaper in 1831.

Grim reaper scythe replica