CYRUS HALL McCORMlCK 



were overflowing. All the warehouses were 

 outgrown. The difficulty was to make a huge 

 building that could be quickly rilled and emptied. 

 Then, at the precise moment when he was 

 needed, an inventor, F. H. Peavey, appeared 

 with a device for elevating grain an endless 

 carrier to which metal cups were fastened. 

 From this idea the elevator was born. 



The first city that appreciated the usefulness 

 of this new, unlovely building was Chicago. It 

 became not only the home of the Reaper, but 

 also the main storehouse of the wheat. It 

 erected one after another of these mastodonic 

 buildings until to-day thirty-six of them stand 

 along the water-front, roomy enough to hold 

 the entire crop of Holland, Sweden, Greece, 

 Egypt, Mexico, and New Zealand. What these 

 immense grain-bins have done for the prosperity 

 of Chicago would require many books to tell 

 completely. It was largely because of them 

 that Chicago outgrew Berlin and became the 

 central metropolis of North America, with 

 twenty-six railways emptying their freight at 



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