Makers of Modern Agriculture Part 2

In his third lecture in the "Crown of Wild Olives," Ruskin points out that all the pure and n.o.ble arts of peace are founded on war. It is worth while, therefore, to note that the British Board of Agriculture was established when Britain was engaged in the supreme struggle with France, which terminated on the field of Waterloo, that the National Department of Agriculture in the United States was inaugurated in the midst of the Civil War, and that the Transvaal Department of Agriculture was commenced ere peace was signed at Vereeniging. In the year 1793 Sinclair's services in restoring commercial confidence during the crisis which occurred at the outbreak of the French War were recognised by Pitt, who sent for him to come to Downing Street, thanked him on behalf of the Government, and asked him if there was anything that he desired. Sinclair replied that he sought no favours for himself, but the most gratifying of all would be the establishment by Parliament of a great National Corporation to be called "The Board of Agriculture." In due course the Board was successfully established with the King as Patron, Sinclair as President, and Arthur Young as Secretary. The annual Parliamentary grant was 3,000.

In this brief review we have no s.p.a.ce to follow the fortune of the Board to the date of the retirement of its inspiring founder, down to the time when it returned 42,000 to the Treasury--not knowing how to spend it--till it finally faded away in the year 1822. Yet the Board accomplished much imperishable work. It carried out agricultural surveys, published several volumes of "communications," promoted prize essays on rural topics, encouraged Elkington, the father of drainage, Macadam the road-maker, and Meikle, the inventor of the thres.h.i.+ng machine, and arranged lectures by Sir Humphry Davy on agricultural chemistry, and by Young on tillage.

The north of Scotland at that period owed much to Sinclair. In 1782 he saved the inhabitants from a serious famine by obtaining a Parliamentary grant of 15,000. In the same year, along with some other patriots, he secured the repeal of the law which for thirty-seven years--since the Rebellion of 1745--had forbidden the use of the kilt.

Sinclair was an enthusiastic tree-planter in a country which was once wittily described by an American visitor as a "Great Clearing." He rebuilt Thurso, and founded the herring fisheries at Wick. To ensure the success of this industry he imported Dutch fishermen to teach the Caithnessmen the art of catching and curing herrings. He introduced improved methods of tillage, a regular rotation of crops, and the cultivation of turnips, clover, and rye-gra.s.s. One of his many schemes was a General Enclosure Bill, his toast at agricultural gatherings being: "May a Common become an Uncommon Spectacle in Caithness."

In 1786 his attachment to William Pitt was rewarded with a baronetcy.

Sir John's domestic life was singularly happy. On referring to the old book already mentioned, we read: "He has been twice married to two of the most beautiful women in the island. His first lady, a Miss Maitland, died prematurely in the bloom of youth. His present lady is the daughter of the late Lord Macdonald, and by her he has a son, George, and other children."

It cannot be doubted that Sir John loved the limelight, possessed an unbounded self-conceit, lacked the saving sense of humour, and over-estimated his own achievements. But these vanities were but the fitful smoke in the blue flame of a burning energy. What a lesson in industry for the youth of South Africa. Fifty years of ceaseless toil, author of thirty-nine volumes and 367 pamphlets. This Scottish agriculturist died in 1835 at the ripe age of eighty-one, and is buried according to an ancient family rite, in Holyrood Chapel at Edinburgh--the friend and confidant of three English kings.

CHAPTER V

CYRUS H. McCORMICK: INVENTOR OF THE REAPER

_"I expect to die in harness, because this is not the world for rest. This is the world for work. In the next world we will have the rest."_--Cyrus H. McCormick.

It is hardly to be expected that those people who devoutly chant in a million churches the fourth sentence of the Lord's Prayer should think with grat.i.tude of any other person than the Divine Giver of all Good.

Yet it is strange to reflect that although every schoolboy knows something of the life of our least Poet Laureate, not one in ten thousand could tell you the career of the man who responded in a truly miraculous manner to the heartfelt, world-voiced matin of both rich and poor, "Give us this day our daily bread."

Cyrus H. McCormick, the inventor of the reaping machine, was born in the eventful year 1809. It was the birth year of Darwin and Tennyson, of Mendelssohn, Gladstone, and Lincoln. He was born on Walnut Grove Farm, amidst the mountains of Virginia, one hundred miles from the sea. He came of that virile stock that has proved to be the main strength of the Republic, that gave Was.h.i.+ngton thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members of his Cabinet, and three out of the five judges of the Supreme Court--the Scots who migrated to Ulster, and thence to the United States. Robert McCormick, the father of Cyrus, was a fairly large farmer, and an inventor of no mean ability. The little log workshop is still shown to the enquiring tourist where father and son moulded and mended machinery on many a rainy day. Indeed, we are told that the McCormick homestead was more like a small factory than a farmer's home, so full was it of rural industries--spinning and weaving, soap and shoes, b.u.t.ter-making and bacon-curing. And it is more than likely that the ceaseless activity of his wise and Celtic mother taught Cyrus the value of each moment of time.

Ever since he was a child of seven it was his father's ambition to invent a reaper. He made one, and tried it in the harvest of 1816, but it proved a failure. It was a fantastic machine, pushed from behind by two horses. It was highly ingenious, but it would not cut the corn, and was hauled off the field to become one of the jokes of the countryside. Hurt by the jests of his neighbours, he locked the door of his workshop and toiled away at night. Early in the summer of 1831 he had so improved his reaper that he gave it another trial. Again it failed. True, the machine cut the corn fairly well, but it flung it on the ground in a tangled heap. Satisfied that there was something radically wrong, Robert McCormick gave up the reaper after having worked at it for over fifteen years.

At this point Cyrus took up the task which his father had reluctantly abandoned. He showed his genius from the very start by adopting a new principle of operation. First of all, he invented the divider to separate the corn to be cut from the corn left standing. Next came the reciprocating blade, and the fingers, the revolving reel, platform, and side draught, and, lastly, the big driving wheel. One day late in the month of July, in the summer of 1831, Cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his reaper. With no spectators save his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, he drove down to a patch of yellow grain. To that little family circle it must have been a moment of intense excitement. Click, click, click--the white blade shot to and fro. What a shout of joy! The wheat is cut and falls upon the platform in a golden, s.h.i.+mmering swathe!

Thus at the early age of twenty-two Cyrus had invented the first practical reaper that the world had seen. And now began his nine years' struggle with adversity, from which he emerged in triumph to become the greatest manufacturer of harvesting machines that America has produced. In order to obtain funds with which to manufacture reapers he started to farm. But he soon found that it was impossible to raise sufficient capital by this means. Near by was a large deposit of iron ore, and he forthwith resolved to build a furnace and make iron. He persuaded his father and the school teacher to become his partners. For several years the furnace did fairly well, when, suddenly, the price of iron fell. The McCormicks were bankrupt. Cyrus gave up the farm, and stuck grimly to his reaper. One day the village constable rode up to the farm door with a summons for a debt of nine-teen dollars, but he was so impressed with the industry of the McCormicks that he had not the heart to serve the notice. It was the darkest hour before the dawn.

The same year (1840) a stranger rode in from the north and drew rein in front of the little log workshop. He was a rough looking man with the homely name of Abraham Smith, but to Cyrus he came as an angel of light. He had come with fifty dollars in his pocket to buy a reaper--the first that was ever sold. A short time later two other farmers came on the same errand, and that summer three reaping machines were working in the wheat-fields of America. In 1842 McCormick sold seven machines, and in 1844 fifty. The home farm had now become a busy factory.

Three years later a friend said to him "Cyrus, why don't you go West with your reaper, where the land is level and labour cheap?"

It was the call of the West.

He travelled over the boundless prairies, and was quick to see that this great land-ocean was the natural home of the reaper. Straightway he transferred his factory to Chicago--then, in 1847, a forlorn little town of less than 10,000 souls. His business flourished. In the great fire of 1871 his factory, which was then turning out 10,000 harvesters a year, was totally destroyed. At the word of his wife he rebuilt it anew with amazing rapidity. And so we find that the tiny workshop in the backwoods of Virginia has become the McCormick City in the heart of Chicago. In the sixty-five years of its life this manufactory has produced over 6,000,000 harvesting machines, and is now pouring them out at the rate of over 7,000 per week. The McCormick Company is now known as the International Harvester Company, and his eldest son, Cyrus H. McCormick, is the President. The annual output is 75,000,000 dollars. It was the reaper that enabled the United States, during the four years of the civil war, not only to feed the armies in the field, but at the same time to export to foreign countries 200,000,000 bushels of wheat. And well might the savants of the French Academy of Science say, when electing Cyrus McCormick a member, that "he had done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."

And now we must trace the evolution of the reaper from its origin on the Walnut Grove Farm to the marvellous machine of to-day. For about thirty years it remained practically unaltered in design, save that seats had been added for the raker and the driver. It did no more than cut the grain and leave it in loose bundles on the ground. It had abolished the sickler and cradler, but there still remained the raker and binder. Might it not be possible to do away with them also, and leave only the driver? Such was the fascinating problem which now confronted the inventor.

In the year 1852 a bedridden cripple called Jearum Atkins bought a McCormick reaper, and had it placed outside his window. To while away the weary hours he actually devised an attachment with two revolving iron arms, which automatically raked off the cut grain from the platform to the ground. It was a grotesque contrivance, and was nicknamed by the farmers the "iron man." Nevertheless, this invention stimulated the manufacture of self-rake reapers, and soon the American farmer would buy no other kind. Thus part of the problem had been solved. The raker was abolished. But there still remained the harder task of supplanting the binder--the man or the woman who gathered up the bundles of cut corn and bound them tightly together with a wisp of straw into the sheaf.

And now another figure appears upon this ever-moving stage, a young man by the name of Charles B. Withington. Born at Akron, Ohio, a year before McCormick invented his reaper, this delicate youth was trained by his father to be a watchmaker. At the age of fifteen, in order to earn pocket-money, he went into the harvest field to bind corn. He was not robust, and the hard, stooping labour under a hot sun would sometimes bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage. There were times after the day's work was done when he was too weary to walk home, and he would throw himself on the stubble to rest. At eighteen he journeyed to the goldfields of California, drifted to Australia, and in the year 1855 arrived back in Wisconsin with 3,000 dollars in his belt. All this money he began to fritter away in trying to invent a self-rake reaper. Suddenly, inspired by the articles of a rural editor, who maintained that the binding of corn should be done by a machine, Withington dropped his self-rake and went straight to work to make a self-binder. He completed his first machine in 1872, but met with much discouragement until, two years later, he came across McCormick.

Their dramatic meeting is best told by Mr. Herbert M. Ca.s.son in his interesting volume, ent.i.tled "Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work."

"One evening in 1874 a tall man; with a box under his arm, walked diffidently up the steps of the McCormick home in Chicago, and rang the bell. He asked to see Mr. McCormick, and was shown into the parlour, where he found Mr. McCormick, sitting, as usual, in a large and comfortable chair.

"'My name is Withington,' said the stranger; I live in Janesville, Wisconsin. I have here a model of a machine that will automatically bind grain.'

"Now, it so happened that McCormick had been kept awake nearly the whole of the previous night by a stubborn business problem. He could scarcely hold his eyelids apart. And when Withington was in the midst of his explanation, with the intentness of a born inventor, Mr. McCormick fell fast asleep. At such a reception to his cherished machine Withington lost heart. He was a gentle, sensitive man easily rebuffed, and so, when McCormick aroused from his nap, Withington had departed, and was on his way back to Wisconsin. For a few seconds McCormick was uncertain as to whether his visitor had been a reality or a dream. Then he awoke with a start into instant action. A great opportunity had come to him, and he had let it slip. He was at this time making self-rake reapers and Marsh harvesters; but what he wanted--what every reaper manufacturer wanted in 1871--was a self-binder. He at once called one of his trusted workmen.

"'I want you to go to Janesville,' he said. Find a man named Withington and bring him to me by the first train that comes back to Chicago.'

"The next day Withington was brought back, and treated with the utmost courtesy. McCormick studied his invention, and found it to be a most remarkable mechanism. Two steel arms caught each bundle of grain, whirled a wire tightly around it, fastened the two ends together with a twist, cut it loose, and tossed it to the ground.

This self-binder was perfect in all its details--as neat and effective a machine as could be imagined. McCormick was delighted.

At last, here was a machine that would abolish the binding of grain by hand."

For six years all went well with the McCormick and Withington self-binder. This wonderful wire-twisting machine was working everywhere with clockwork precision, and was believed to be the best that human ingenuity could devise. All at once the manufacturing world was startled with the news that William Deering had made and sold three thousand twine self-binders. Deering, by this dramatic move became in a flash McCormick's most powerful compet.i.tor. He was not a farmer's son, like the latter, being bred in the city and trained in a factory. He had been a successful merchant at Maine, then left it to enter the harvester trade. He staked his whole fortune on making twine binders. He won, and McCormick was forced to follow in his wake. The evolution of the reaper into the twine self-binder was an epoch-making event in the agricultural world. It enormously increased the sales. In 1880, 60,000 reapers were sold; five years later the figures had risen to 250,000. Since then, with the exception of the new knot-tying device, there has been no real change in the reaper. It remains the grandest of all agricultural machines, and one of the most astonis.h.i.+ng mechanisms ever devised by the brain of man.

McCormick died in 1884. In the span of his own life the reaper was born and brought to perfection. He created it in a remote Virginian village, and he lived to see his catalogue printed in twenty languages, and to know that so long as the human race continues to eat bread the sun will never set on the Empire of his reaper, for somewhere, in every month in all the year, you will find the corn white unto the harvest.

R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

=THE RURAL SCIENCE SERIES=

Edited by Professor L. H. BAILEY

=THE SOIL.= By F. H. King. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.

=THE FERTILITY OF THE LAND.= By I. P. Roberts. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.

=THE SPRAYING OF PLANTS.= By E. G. Lodeman. 5_s._ 6_d._ net,

=MILK AND ITS PRODUCTS.= By H. H. Wing. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.

=PRINCIPLES OF FRUIT GROWING.= By L. H. Bailey. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.

=FERTILIZERS.= By E. B. Voorhees. 5_s._ 6_d._ net.

=IRRIGATION AND DRAINAGE.= By F. H. King. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.