page_title: Cyrus McCormick
section_title: Early life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Cyrus McCormick / Early life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Sketch from 1845 patent of an improved grain reaper by Cyrus Hall McCormick.
context_page_description: Cyrus Hall McCormick was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which later became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902. Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he and many members of the McCormick family became prominent residents of Chicago.
  McCormick has been simplistically credited as the single inventor of the mechanical reaper. He was, however, one of several designing engineers who produced successful models in the 1830s. His efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr., as well as the aid of Jo Anderson, a person enslaved by his family. He also successfully developed a modern company, with manufacturing, marketing, and a sales force to market his products.
context_section_description: Cyrus McCormick was born on February 15, 1809 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He was the eldest of eight children born to inventor Robert McCormick Jr. (1780–1846) and Mary Ann "Polly" Hall (1780–1853). As Cyrus' father saw the potential of the design for a mechanical reaper, he applied for a patent to claim it as his own invention. He worked for 28 years on a horse-drawn mechanical reaper to harvest grain; he was never able to reproduce a reliable version, however.
  Cyrus took up the project. He was aided by Jo Anderson, an enslaved African American on the McCormick plantation at the time. A few machines based on a design of Patrick Bell of Scotland (which had not been patented) were available in the United States in these years. The Bell machine was pushed by horses. The McCormick design was pulled by horses and cut the grain to one side of the team.
  Cyrus McCormick held one of his first demonstrations of mechanical reaping at the nearby village of Steeles Tavern, Virginia in 1831. He claimed to have developed a final version of the reaper in 18 months. The young McCormick was granted a patent on the reaper on June 21, 1834, two years after having been granted a patent for a self-sharpening plow. None was sold, however, because the machine could not handle varying conditions.
  The McCormick family also worked together in a blacksmith/metal smelting business. The panic of 1837 almost caused the family to go into bankruptcy when a partner pulled out. In 1839 McCormick started doing more public demonstrations of the reaper, but local farmers still thought the machine was unreliable. He did sell one in 1840, but none for 1841.
  Using the endorsement of his father's first customer for a machine built by McPhetrich, Cyrus continuously attempted to improve the design. He finally sold seven reapers in 1842, 29 in 1843, and 50 in 1844. They were all built manually in the family farm shop. 
  He received a second patent for reaper improvements on January 31, 1845.
  As word spread about the reaper, McCormick noticed orders arriving from farther west, where farms tended to be larger and the land flatter. While he was in Washington, D.C. to get his 1845 patent, he heard about a factory in Brockport, New York, where he contracted to have the machines mass-produced. He also licensed several others across the country to build the reaper, but their quality often proved poor, which hurt the product's reputation.
caption: Sketch of 1845 model reaper
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