HIS LIFE AND WORK 



the Reaper hauled along the road by two horses, 

 which, she said, "had to be led by a couple of 

 darkies, because they were scared to death by 

 the racket of the machine." And she expressed 

 the general unbelief of that day, very likely, by 

 saying, "I thought it was a right smart curious 

 sort of a thing, but that it wouldn't come to 

 much." 



Cyrus McCormick was far from being the first 

 to secure a Reaper patent. He was the forty- 

 seventh. Twenty-three others in Europe and 

 twenty-three in the United States had invented 

 machines of varying inefficiency; but there was 

 not one of these which could have been im- 

 proved into the proper shape. Without any 

 exception, the rival manufacturers who rose up 

 in later years to fight McCormick did him the 

 homage of copying his Reaper; and certainly 

 none of them attempted to offer for sale any type 

 of machine that was invented prior to 1831. 



A careful study of the pre-McCormick Reapers 

 reveals one fault common to all, they were 

 made by theorists, to cut ideal grain in ideal 

 fields. Some of them, if grain always grew 



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