The successful trial of the reaper was in 1832, when the United States was about fifty years old. For the next ten years Cyrus McCormick was preaching reapers but he did not succeed in selling them. They seemed very costly to the farmer; and, moreover, they were not the perfect machines we know to-day, machines which work as if they had brains of their own. Not until 1840 was Cyrus McCormick successful in selling the reapers, which he made himself at his home. Then he sold two machines for fifty dollars each. Two years later he sold seven for one hundred dollars each. Soon he could sell hundreds.
The West Virginia home was not a good location for making the reapers as it was both difficult and expensive, with the poor railroad facilities of the day, to ship the machines to the great West where it was already plain that the largest number would be used. Accordingly Cyrus McCormick moved nearer his best market, establishing himself first in Cincinnati, but two years later, in 1847, choosing the very new, very muddy, very unattractive little town which has since become the immense city of Chicago. History has shown the wisdom of his choice. Chicago soon became the greatest distributing center of the West, and as the reaper was necessary to work successfully the big wheat fields, it was no uncommon sight as early as the sixties to see, moving out from Chicago, a whole train loaded with nothing but showy bright-red reapers.
[Illustration: MCCORMICK'S REAPING MACHINE
As advertised in _The Working Farmer_, 1852. Notice that a man rides on the machine to rake off the grain.]
During the ten years while Cyrus McCormick was struggling to introduce his reaper, Ezra Harding grew to admire more and more the tall, handsome, powerful man who never lost his courage. Ezra believed in reapers almost as fully as did Mr. McCormick himself; and when Mr. McCormick moved to Chicago, Ezra followed him to help make the wonderful machines.
In the years between the first successful trial and the time when Ezra went to Chicago so many changes had been made in the reaper that Miss Polly Carson would hardly have recognized it, had she seen it coming down the road. When the machine was tried in Farmer Ruff's field the grain was cut by a cutting bar similar to that on a mowing machine, then it was caught by a reel and carried to a platform from which it was raked to be tied in bundles. Two men were needed with each machine; one walked beside the horses to drive them, the other walked beside the platform to rake off the wheat for the bundling. Not very long afterward Mr. McCormick added seats for both driver and raker. One of the next big changes was to take off the raker and his seat and put in their place an "iron man." This was really a long iron finger moved by the turning wheels, which did the work of the raker, and automatically pushed off the cut grain in untied bundles.