men who made the greatest contributions were Cyrus H. McCormick,
C. W. Marsh, Charles B. Withington, and John F. Appleby. The name that
stands foremost, of course, is that of McCormick, but each of the others
made additions to his invention that have produced the present finished
machine. It seems like the stroke of an ironical fate which decreed
that since it was the invention of a Northerner, Eli Whitney, that made
inevitable the Civil War, so it was the invention of a Southerner, Cyrus
McCormick, that made inevitable the ending of that war in favor of the
North. McCormick was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on a farm
about eighteen miles from Staunton. He was a child of that pioneering
Scotch-Irish race which contributed so greatly to the settlement of this
region and which afterward made such inestimable additions to American
citizenship. The country in which he grew up was rough and, so far as
the conventionalities go, uncivilized; the family homestead was little
more than a log cabin; and existence meant a continual struggle with
a not particularly fruitful soil. The most remarkable figure in the
McCormick home circle, and the one whose every-day life exerted the
greatest influence on the boy, was his father. The older McCormick
had one obsessing idea that made him the favorite butt of the local
humorists. He believed that the labor spent in reaping grain was a
useless expenditure of human effort and that machinery might be made
to do the work. Other men, in this country and in Europe, had nourished
similar notions. Several Englishmen had invented reaping machines, all
of which had had only a single defect--they would not reap. An ingenious
English actor had developed a contrivance which would cut imitation
wheat on the stage, but no one had developed a machine that would work
satisfactorily in real life. Robert McCormick spent the larger part
of his days and nights tinkering at a practical machine. He finally
produced a horrific contrivance, made up of whirling sickles, knives,
and revolving rods, pushed from behind by two horses; when he tried this
upon a grain-field, however, it made a humiliating failure.

Evidently Robert McCormick had ambitions far beyond his powers; yet
without his absurd experiments the development of American agriculture
might have waited many years. They became the favorite topics of
conversation in the evening gatherings that took place about the family
log fire. Robert McCormick h