After the trial was over, Mr. Harding and Ezra joined the excited little group around the inventor.
"Your reaper is a success," Ezra heard Robert McCormick say to his son, "and it makes me proud to have a son do what I could not do!" Ezra felt like throwing his cap and cheering. What a joy to have a machine which could do that back-breaking work he had had to do in harvesting the grain!
That night the machine was hauled to the court house square in Lexington. There it was examined by a crowd of curious people who had heard of the successful trial in the afternoon. One of the men who was specially interested in the machine was Professor Bradshaw of the Female Academy of Lexington, a thoughtful man whose judgment was greatly respected in the community. In his usual impressive manner he fairly astounded the bystanders by the wholly improbable statement, "That machine is worth--a--hundred--thousand--dollars!"
"A hundred thousand dollars!" repeated Mr. Harding when the remark was told him the next day. "I think this time Professor Bradshaw is wrong. Cyrus McCormick will be disappointed, surely, if he expects any such large returns from his invention. The great inventors have not become very rich men even when the invention, like the cotton gin, has caused a revolution in a whole industry."
This was when Cyrus McCormick was twenty-three years old. Before he was an old man the reaper had proved itself worth more millions than the predicted thousands, and Ezra and his father had many a laugh over Mr. Harding's criticism of Professor Bradshaw. However, at the time the astounding remark was made, not even the inventor himself dreamed of the complete change in methods of farming which the reaper would make all over the country. Nobody, indeed, could realize that within the life time of the inventor it would be possible for the farmers of the United States to raise enough wheat to feed the whole world. Most people, naturally enough, perhaps, felt as did Miss Polly Carson when she saw the reaper dragged along the road on the way to Farmer Ruff's field. Years later when she told the story of that day she said:
"I thought it a right smart curious sort of thing, but that it wouldn't amount to much."