Today in Technology History

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February 15

Cyrus Hall McCormick, the inventor of the mechanical reaper, was born on February 15, 1809.

McCormick's father was an inventor who, like countless others, had tried and failed to design a machine for reaping and gathering grain. In 1831, however, 22-year-old Cyrus McCormick successfully built a basic, horse-drawn reaper.

He patented his reaper in 1834, and began the challenging work of convincing farmers that they needed his device. In the 1840s, McCormick moved his operation to the plains of the Midwest United States. He built a factory in the young city of Chicago and began an intensive marketing campaign. By the 1850s, his company was selling thousands of reapers per year.

To understand the impact of the McCormick reaper on farm life, just consider this statistic: In 1800, the vast majority of Americans were employed in farm labor, while today, less than 2 percent of the U.S. population works on farms. Thanks to innovations like the McCormick reaper, farm work became faster and easier, and fewer field laborers were necessary.

(It is interesting to note that an earlier agricultural invention, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, had a very different effect. By making cotton a profitable crop, the cotton gin actually resulted in a vastly greater demand for labor in the southern U.S. -- which increased the South's dependence on slavery.)

McCormick died in 1884, having made a fortune off his invention, and having helped to usher the world from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age.

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