

After several improvements to the design, he established a harvester factory in. They could pay for this new product over time and still reap their harvests. In 1834, inventor Cyrus McCormick took out a patent for a horse-drawn reaper.

In addition to his fame as an inventor, McCormick deserves applause because his company sold on credit to farmers who needed reapers to make a living. People said the McCormick reaper "hastened the westward expansion of the United States." The McCormick family farm in Rockbridge County where Cyrus invented the mechanical reaper was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964. He had a good head for business, sold many reapers, and by 1856, he was famous. But McCormick got the credit.Īt first, selling the reaper was a slow process, especially from where he lived in Walnut Grove, Pennsylvania. Cyrus Hall McCormick invented the mechanical reaper, which combined all the steps that earlier harvesting machines had performed separately.

With small grains as the main crops, mechanical reapers made Midwestern. McCormick's machine meant that the prairies of the Midwest could now become the 'breadbasket' of the nation. In 1842 McCormick advertised that purchasers of his reaper ran no financial. Many people believe that his father, a farmer and inventor, helped invent the reaper. Beginning in 1841, the mechanical reaper finally caught on, so much so that McCormick was later forced to move production out of his family farm's blacksmith shop and into a factory in Chicago (1847). Cyrus McCormick | PBSĪmazing! At age twenty-two, Cyrus McCormick imagined how a reaper could work, built a model, and tested it all in six weeks' time! He finished his creation just in time for the harvest of 1831.
