Cyrus McCormick was an American inventor and industrialist who developed a horse-drawn mechanical reaper that transformed grain harvesting. Building on and patenting a design in 1834, he refined the machine through the 1840s so that a team of horses and one operator could cut far more wheat in a day than several men with scythes, and he built a manufacturing and sales organization, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago, that made the reaper widely affordable to American and European farmers. The productivity gains freed agricultural labor for industrial growth and made McCormick one of the defining figures of nineteenth-century mechanized agriculture. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
FAQs
Why did Cyrus McCormick move his reaper business to Chicago?
He moved to Chicago in 1847 because it was the center of American agricultural trade.
McCormick moved to Chicago in 1847 because it was the heart of the American agricultural trade. There he opened a factory to manufacture his reaping machine.
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In Field
Source Cyrus McCormick (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Held Differently
Reaper, Inventions Why this is disputed. Patented his mechanical reaper design in 1834 in Virginia, a year after Obed Hussey's rival 1833 patent; McCormick's version became the more commercially successful.
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Source Cyrus McCormick (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributorsLead sentence 1tier 2Quote, Lead sentence 1
Cyrus Hall McCormick (February 15, 1809 – May 13, 1884) was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902.
Sources
1. Cyrus McCormick (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Cyrus Hall McCormick (February 15, 1809, May 13, 1884) was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902.
- In Field: Agricultural Engineering
In Group: Agricultural Machinery Inventors, Lead paragraph
McCormick always claimed credit as the single inventor of the mechanical reaper.
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