46 Facts About Cyrus McCormick

Cyrus Hall McCormick was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which later became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902.

Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he and many members of the McCormick family became prominent residents of Chicago.

Cyrus McCormick has been simplistically credited as the single inventor of the mechanical reaper.

Cyrus McCormick was one of several designing engineers who produced successful models in the 1830s.

Cyrus McCormick's efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr.

Cyrus McCormick successfully developed a modern company, with manufacturing, marketing, and a sales force to market his products.

Cyrus Hall McCormick was born on February 15,1809, in Raphine, Virginia.

Cyrus McCormick was the eldest of eight children born to inventor Robert McCormick Jr.

Cyrus McCormick worked for 28 years on a horse-drawn mechanical reaper to harvest grain, but was never able to reproduce a reliable version.

The Cyrus McCormick design was pulled by horses and cut the grain to one side of the team.

Cyrus McCormick held one of his first demonstrations of mechanical reaping at the nearby village of Steeles Tavern, Virginia in 1831.

Cyrus McCormick claimed to have developed a final version of the reaper in 18 months.

The young Cyrus McCormick was granted a patent on the reaper on June 21,1834, two years after having been granted a patent for a self-sharpening plow.

In 1839 Cyrus McCormick started doing more public demonstrations of the reaper, but local farmers still thought the machine was unreliable.

Cyrus McCormick did sell one in 1840, but none for 1841.

Cyrus McCormick finally sold seven reapers in 1842,29 in 1843, and 50 in 1844.

Cyrus McCormick received a second patent for reaper improvements on January 31,1845.

Cyrus McCormick licensed several others across the country to build the reaper, but their quality often proved poor, which hurt the product's reputation.

When Cyrus McCormick tried to renew his patent in 1848, the US Patent Office noted that a similar machine had already been patented by Obed Hussey a few months earlier.

Cyrus McCormick claimed he had really invented his machine in 1831, but the renewal was denied.

The Cyrus McCormick reaper sold well, partially as a result of savvy and innovative business practices.

Cyrus McCormick developed marketing and sales techniques, developing a wide network of salesmen trained to demonstrate operation of the machines in the field, as well as to get parts quickly and repair machines in the field if necessary during crucial times in the farm year.

In 1851, Cyrus McCormick traveled to London to display a reaper at the Crystal Palace Exhibition.

Cyrus McCormick's celebration was short-lived after he learned that he had lost a court challenge to Hussey's patent.

Cyrus McCormick demanded that Manny stop producing reapers, and pay Cyrus McCormick $400,000.

Cyrus McCormick hired the former US Attorney General Reverdy Johnson and New York patent attorney Edward Nicholl Dickerson.

In 1856, Cyrus McCormick's factory was producing more than 4000 reapers each year, mostly sold in the Midwest and West.

Cyrus McCormick decided to seek help from the US Congress to protect his patent.

In 1871, the factory burned down in the Great Chicago Fire, but Cyrus McCormick heeded his wife's advice to rebuild, and it reopened in 1873 even as Cyrus McCormick's health declined, so she took a greater role in the family's business as well as philanthropic affairs.

Cyrus McCormick wanted to acknowledge the contributions of others in the family to the reaper "invention" and company, especially their father.

On January 26,1858,49-year-old Cyrus McCormick married his secretary Nancy "Nettie" Fowler.

Cyrus McCormick was an orphan from New York who had graduated from the Troy Female Seminary and moved to Chicago.

Cyrus McCormick was an uncle of Robert Sanderson McCormick ; granduncle of Joseph Medill McCormick and Robert Rutherford McCormick; and great-granduncle of William McCormick Blair Jr.

Cyrus McCormick had always been a devout Presbyterian, as well as advocate of Christian unity.

Cyrus McCormick valued and demonstrated in his life the Calvinist traits of self-denial, sobriety, thriftiness, efficiency, and morality.

Cyrus McCormick believed feeding the world, made easier by the reaper, was part of his religious mission in life.

Cyrus McCormick's views were unpopular in his adopted home town.

Cyrus McCormick unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat for Illinois's 2nd congressional district with a peace-now platform in 1864, and was soundly defeated by Republican John Wentworth.

Cyrus McCormick proposed a peace plan to include a Board of Arbitration.

Cyrus McCormick supported efforts to annex the Dominican Republic as a territory of the United States.

Cyrus McCormick later proposed an international mechanism to control food production and distribution.

Cyrus McCormick became the principal benefactor and a trustee of what had been the Theological Seminary of the Northwest, which moved to Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood in 1859, a year in which he endowed four professorships.

Also, in 1872, Cyrus McCormick purchased a religious newspaper, the Interior, which he renamed the Continent and became a leading Presbyterian periodical.

Cyrus McCormick died at home in Chicago on May 13,1884.

Cyrus McCormick was survived by his widow, Nettie, who continued his Christian and charitable activities, within the United States and abroad, between 1890 and her death in 1923, donating $8 million to hospitals, disaster and relief agencies, churches, youth activities and educational institutions, and becoming the leading benefactress of Presbyterian Church activities in that era.

Various members of the Cyrus McCormick family continued involvement with the corporation until Brooks Cyrus McCormick, who died in 2006.