What do you do when there are too few hands to harvest the crops and there are miles and miles of flat, stoneless prairie on which to grow crops? You build a mechanical reaper. And that’s exactly what Cyrus Hall McCormick did. 

McCormick, who was born on this day in 1809 on a farm in Walnut Grove, Virginia, had watched his father’s unsuccessful attempts at building a reaper. Cyrus was bound and determined to succeed where his father had failed. So he went about the task of building a mechanical reaper which he tested in a Virginia wheat field. By his 25th birthday, he had improved the reaper enough to get a patent for it. Then, at the age of 38, with sixty dollars in his pocket, Cyrus went to Chicago where he set up a reaper factory. 

The time and place were right for reaping ... the rich prairie wheatlands of the United States were being developed. Little did Cyrus McCormick know that he was creating the machine that would be second only to the railroad in the development of the United States, a symbol of the mechanical revolution in agriculture. 

McCormick survived two decades of court battles to gain patent rights for reaper parts. He purchased other patents and made his company a leader in reapers. His invention had achieved worldwide notoriety and he became a millionaire before his fortieth birthday as head of The McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. 

Cyrus Hall McCormick died on May 13, 1884. 18 years later, his company merged into what we now know as International Harvester Company. And the world has been reaping the benefits of his wonderful machine ever since.