Cyrus McCormick

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/