Given Cyrus' entrepreneurial prowess and the obvious utility of the reaper, economists and historians have wondered why farmers were slow to adopt the machine. He capitalized on international marketing opportunities, and he eventually helped bring state-of-the-art manufacturing to the Midwest. Then he assembled a large and effective sales network and equipped it with slick catalogs, posters, and other promotional items. He moved to Chicago in 1847 to better serve the emerging Midwestern market.
As early as the 1840s, Cyrus promoted the reaper with sophisticated use of advertising and publicity. So regardless of who invented the reaper, Hounshell contends that Cyrus was the Schumpeterian entrepreneur whose insights and efforts led to its widespread adoption. In his 1912 book, The Theory of Economic Development, Schumpeter wrote: "Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organizational novelty, not just its invention." In this context, the Schumpeterian entrepreneur is the innovator who replaces old ways of doing things with better ways of doing things, a process that Schumpeter would describe later as "creative destruction." Joseph Schumpeter, a Harvard University economist who was born one year before Cyrus died, famously highlighted the key role that entrepreneurs play in driving economic development. "From a Schumpeterian perspective, who was the successful entrepreneur who was innovating mechanized reaping in the United States and Europe?" And as far back as the 1870s, some members of the McCormick family have argued that most of the credit for inventing the reaper should go to Robert McCormick.īut the long-standing debate over who invented the reaper obscures a more important question, says David Hounshell, professor of technology and social change at Carnegie Mellon University. But some historians have said that Hussey's contributions may have been just as important - perhaps more important - to the technological evolution of the machine. Within six weeks, he successfully demonstrated his machine by harvesting oats at nearby Steele's Tavern.įor many years, Cyrus was acclaimed nationally and internationally as the singular inventor of the reaper.
After Robert abandoned the project in 1831, young Cyrus started building a reaper based on a different principle. The traditional story of the McCormick reaper begins with Cyrus' father, Robert McCormick, who had been trying to develop a workable reaper for several years at Walnut Grove, the family's plantation in Rockbridge County, Va. In turn, the mechanization of agriculture accelerated industrialization and urbanization as displaced workers migrated more rapidly from farms to factories. The reaper broke the harvest-labor bottleneck by allowing the farmer "to reap as much as he could sow." This big step toward automation allowed farms to become larger and more productive. "Of all the inventions during the first half of the nineteenth century which revolutionized agriculture, the reaper was probably the most important," wrote University of Chicago historian William Hutchinson in his two-volume biography of McCormick in the 1930s. McCormick was staking his claim to one of the most important breakthroughs in the mechanization of agriculture. "I would warn all persons against the use of the aforesaid principle," McCormick wrote, "as I regard and treat the use of it, in any way, as an infringement of my right." McCormick immediately wrote a letter to the editor claiming that he had invented a reaper in 1831 based on the same principle as Hussey's machine. Cyrus McCormick spied his archrival for the first time in the April 1834 issue of Mechanics' Magazine, which published a drawing and description of a mechanized reaping machine patented by Obed Hussey.
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