HIS LIFE AND WORK 



the making of 3,000 twine self-binders, and 

 won. 



Cyrus McCormick saw at a glance that the 

 wire self-binder must go. It was his policy to 

 give the farmers what they wanted, rather than 

 to force upon them an unpopular machine. 

 So he called to his aid a mechanical genius 

 named Marquis L. Gorham one of those 

 who had been lured into the quest of a self- 

 binder by the insistence of "Pump" Carpenter. 

 Gorham's most valuable contribution was a self- 

 sizing device, by which all bound sheaves were 

 made to be the same size. By the time that 

 the grain stood ripe and yellow the following 

 season, Gorham had prepared a twine self- 

 binder that worked well, and McCormick, 

 yielding to this sudden hostility against wire, 

 pushed the Gorham machine with the full force 

 of his great organization. 



This evolution of the Reaper into the twine 

 self-binder was a momentous event. It tremen- 

 dously increased the sales. There were 60,000 

 machines of all kinds sold in 1880, and 250,000 

 in 1885 And it strikingly decreased the num- 



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