location of mccormick reaper works chicago 1900

At the time, other cities in the midwestern United States, such as Cleveland, Ohio St. In 1847, after their father's death, Cyrus and his brother Leander (1819–1900) moved to Chicago, where they established a factory to build their machines. He also licensed several others across the country to build the reaper, but their quality often proved poor, which hurt the product's reputation. to get his 1845 patent, he heard about a factory in Brockport, New York, where he contracted to have the machines mass-produced. He received a second patent for reaper improvements on January 31, 1845.Īs word spread about the reaper, McCormick noticed orders arriving from farther west, where farms tended to be larger and the land flatter. They were all built manually in the family farm shop.

He finally sold seven reapers in 1842, 29 in 1843, and 50 in 1844. Using the endorsement of his father's first customer for a machine built by McPhetrich, Cyrus continually attempted to improve the design. He did sell one in 1840, but none for 1841. In 1839 McCormick started doing more public demonstrations of the reaper, but local farmers still thought the machine was unreliable. He also successfully developed a modern company, with manufacturing, marketing, and a sales force to market his products. His efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr., with the aid of Jo Anderson, who was enslaved by the family. He was, however, one of several designing engineers who produced successful models in the 1830s. McCormick has been simplistically credited as the single inventor of the mechanical reaper. Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he and many members of the McCormick family became prominent residents of Chicago. Cyrus Hall McCormick (Febru– May 13, 1884) was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which later became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902.

Location of mccormick reaper works chicago 1900