In 1847 he opened his first factory, near the city of Chicago, then a small and unimportant town. McCormick built his first reaper in 1831, at the age of 22. This limited a farm's productivity to the amount of grain and the number of acres that could be maintained by a single person or family with occasional assistance. Although attempts were made to automate parts of this process, they were unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. The grain was then bundled together by hand and brought to a central place where grains were separated from the stalks and chaff using technology that dated back to the earliest farmers. This placed severe constraints on not just farmers, but on society as a whole because workers in the fields were not available to operate factories, provide nonfarm services, or perform any of the other tasks upon which a technological society rests.įor thousands of years grain was harvested by people wielding scythes and other manual cutting devices. However, for most of human history, growing grain and other crops has been wholly dependent on the availability of human labor for field preparation, planting, and harvesting. Many have argued convincingly that the development of agriculture is what allowed nomadic hunter-gatherers to develop written language, cities, civilization, and more. BackgroundĪgriculture, the domestication of plant and animal species for food production, is arguably the most important development in human history. Further refinements gave rise to the combine and other mechanical devices that have made it possible for a relatively small number of farmers to maintain and harvest thousands of acres of crops and to feed thousands of people each year. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884) developed the first device to reliably and effectively cut and gather grain in the field. Cyrus McCormick Invents the Reaping Machine Overview
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