i68 



THE ESSENTIALS OF AGRICULTURE 



209. Harvesting. Wheat was probably first harvested by 

 picking the heads by hand or by pulling the entire plant and 

 removing the heads with a comb or hackle (Figs. 78 and 79). 

 Crude stone instruments were devised to aid in pulling or break- 

 ing the straw, and these 

 were later displaced by 

 the sickle. The next 

 development was the 

 scythe, and then the 

 cradle, which appears to 

 have been first used 

 by the Romans (Figs. 

 la and id). These im- 

 plements were the only 

 ones used for harvest- 

 ing grain until after 

 1840. The rapid in- 

 crease in the wheat acre- 

 age since the beginning 

 of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury is largely due to the 

 invention of the reap- 

 ing machine (Fig. 2) 

 by McCormick (Fig. 

 80), the self-binder by 

 Appleby and others, and 

 the headers and the 

 combination harvesters 

 (Fig. 3) and threshers 

 (Fig. 81) which are now 

 so extensively used. 



In many countries 

 grain is still harvested with the sickle and threshed with the 

 flail. Most of the countries which use reapers and threshers 

 depend upon America to supply them with machines. America 

 excels in inventing and manufacturing farm machinery. 



FIG. 80. McCormick, the inventor of the 

 reaping machine 



Cyrus Hall McCormick, 1809-1884, was a Virginia 

 farmer and blacksmith. He invented a grain cradle 

 at the age of fifteen and the reaper at the age of 

 twenty-two. His father, Robert McCormick, in- 

 vented a clover huller, a hemp-brake, and a threshing 

 machine, and tried to invent a reaper but failed. At 

 the close of the first trial of the new reaper, in which 

 young McCormick was praised as well as jeered at, 

 the father said, " Your reaper is a success. It makes 

 me feel proud to have a son do what I failed to do " 



