Cyrus Hall McCormick Part 4

He was a tall man of striking appearance. At that time he wore no beard, and with his keen eyes, high forehead, long straight nose, and masterful under-lip, he would attract attention in any a.s.semblage. By his hospitality and courtly manners he made many friends for the city. Among his guests were Webster, Van Buren, Bryant, Tilden, and Miss Martineau.

And when Cyrus McCormick came to him and proposed the building of a Reaper factory, Ogden was as quick as a flash to see its value to Chicago. "You are the man we want," said he to McCormick. "I'll give you $25,000 for a half interest, and we'll start to build the factory at once."

This partnership helped McCormick greatly. It gave him at once capital, credit, prestige, and a factory. It enabled him to escape from the tyranny of small anxieties. It set him free from contract-breaking manufacturers, who looked upon the making of Reapers merely as business, and not, as McCormick did, as a mission. He now had his chance to manufacture on a large scale; and he immediately made plans to sell 500 Reapers for the harvest of 1848. He built the largest factory in Chicago, on the spot where John Kinzie had built the first house in 1804, and thus once for all was solved the problem of where and how his Reapers should be made.

For two years it was one of the sights of Chicago to see McCormick and Ogden walking together to their factory. They were both tall, powerful, dominating men, and were easily the chief citizens--the Romulus and Remus of a city that was destined to be more populous than Rome.

But they were not suited as co-workers. Each was too strong-willed for co-operative action. Also, Ogden was a man of many interests, while McCormick was absorbed in his Reaper. There was no open quarrel, but in 1849 McCormick said: "I will pay you back the $25,000 that you invested, and give you $25,000 for profits and interest." Ogden accepted, well pleased to have doubled his money in two years; and from that time onward McCormick had no partners except the members of his own family.

Moving at once from one obstacle to another, as McCormick did throughout the whole course of his life, he now began to create the best possible _system_ of selling his Reapers to the farmers. This he had to do, for the reason that there was no means at that time whereby he could offer them for sale. The village blacksmith was too busy at his anvil to become an agent. The village storekeeper was not a mechanic, and was too careful of his reputation among the farmers to offer for sale a machine that he did not understand. Therefore, McCormick bent all his energies to this new task of devising a mode of action. He began to develop what he was apt to call "the finger-ends of the business." And he created a new species of commercial organization which is by many thought to be fully as remarkable as his invention of the Reaper.

First, he gave a _Written Guarantee_ with every machine. He had conceived of this inducement as early as 1842. He "warranted the performance of the Reaper in every respect," and by this means made seven sales in that year. In 1848 he had his guarantee printed like an advertis.e.m.e.nt, with a picture of the Reaper at the top, and blank s.p.a.ces for the farmer, the agent, and two witnesses to sign. The price of the machine was to be $120. The farmer was to pay $30 cash, and the balance in six months, on condition that the Reaper would cut one and a half acres an hour, that it would scatter less grain than the grain-cradle, that it was well made, and that the raking off could easily be done from a raker's seat. If the Reaper failed to fulfil these promises, it was to be brought back and the $30 was to be refunded.

This idea of giving a free trial, and returning the money to any dissatisfied customer, was at that time new and revolutionary. To-day it is the code of the department store, and even the mail-order establishments are in many instances adopting it. It has become one of the higher laws of the business world. It has driven that discreditable maxim, "Let the buyer beware," out of all decent commercialism. To McCormick, who had never studied the selfish economic theories of his day, there was no reason for any antagonism between buyer and seller. He trusted his Reaper and he trusted the farmers. And he built his business foursquare on this confidence.

Second, he sold his Reapers at a _Known Price_. He announced the price in newspapers and posters. This, too, has since become an established rule in business; but it was not so sixty years ago. The Oriental method of chaffering and bargaining was largely in vogue. The buyer got as high a price as he could in each case. Among merchants, A. T. Stewart was probably the first to abolish this practice of haggling, and to mark his goods in plain figures. And in the selling of farm machinery, it was McCormick who laid down the principle of equal prices to all and special rebates to none--a principle which has been very generally followed ever since, except during periods of over-strenuous compet.i.tion.

Third, he was one of the first American business men who believed heartily in a policy of _Publicity_. As early as September 28, 1833, he began to advertise his Reaper; and his advertis.e.m.e.nt was nearly a column in length. Also, in the same paper, he had a half-column advertis.e.m.e.nt of his hillside plow. This was publicity on a large scale, according to the ideas of advertising that were then prevalent. Even George Washington, when advertising an extensive land scheme in 1773, had not thought of using more than half a column of a Baltimore paper.

McCormick was an efficient advertiser, too, as well as an enterprising one. When he talked to farmers, he knew what to say. He told the story of what one of his Reapers had done, and named the time and the farm and the farmers. He made great use of the argument that the Reaper pays for itself, and showed that it would cost the farmer less to buy it than _not_ to buy it.

Among the many testimonials that he got from farmers the one that pleased him most, and which he scattered broadcast, was one in which a farmer said: "My Reaper has more than paid for itself in one harvest."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PANORAMIC VIEW SHOWING THE McCORMICK REAPER WORKS BEFORE THE CHICAGO FIRE OF 1871, ON CHICAGO RIVER, EAST OF RUSH STREET BRIDGE]

In 1849, when the rush to the new gold mines of California began, he was quick to see his opportunity. This sudden exodus of a hundred thousand men to the Pacific coast meant much to him, and he knew it. It meant a decrease in the number of farm laborers and an increase in the amount of money in circulation. More than this, it meant that Chicago was no longer a city of the Far West. It was _central_. It was the link between the banks and factories of the East and the gold mines and prairies of the West. So McCormick quickly prepared an elaborate advertis.e.m.e.nt, warning the farmers that labor would now become scarce and expensive, that the coming grain crop promised to be a large one, and giving the names and addresses of ninety-two farmers who were now using his machines.

The fourth factor in the McCormick System was the appointment of a _Responsible Agent_ and the building of a storage warehouse at every compet.i.tive point. He did not wait for the business to grow. He pushed it. He thrust it forward by sending an agent to every danger-spot on the firing-line. As one of his compet.i.tors complained, in an 1848 lawsuit, McCormick "flooded the country with his machines." He knew that many farmers would be undecided until the very hour of harvest, when there would be no time to get a Reaper from Chicago; and therefore he had supplies of machines stored in various parts of the country. By 1849 he had nineteen of these agencies.

His plan, with regard to these agents, was to fasten them to him by exclusive contracts, which forbade them to sell Reapers made by any other manufacturers. Each agent was given free scope. He was not worried by detail instructions. He was picked out for his aggressive, self-reliant qualities, and the whole responsibility of a certain territory was put upon him. Once a month he made a report; but he stood or fell by the final showing for the year, which he made in October.

This plan of leaving his men free and putting them upon their mettle, developed their mental muscle to the utmost. Also, it made them intensely loyal and combative--a regiment, not of private soldiers, but generals, each one in charge of his own province, blamed for his defeats and rewarded for his victories.

The fifth factor in the McCormick System was the _Customers' Good-Will_.

For the good-will of other capitalists or for the applause of the public in general, no men cared less than McCormick. But he always stood well with the farmers. "I have never yet sued a farmer for the price of a Reaper," he said in 1848. This heroic policy he pursued as long as possible, knowing the fear that all farmers have of contracts that may lead them into litigation. More than this, he freely gave them credit, without being safeguarded by any Dun or Bradstreet. He allowed them to pay with the money that was saved during the harvest. "It is better that I should wait for the money," he said, "than that you should wait for the machine that you need." So he borrowed money in Chicago to build the Reapers, borrowed more money to pay the freight, and then sold them on time to the farmers.

In some cases he lost heavily, as in Kansas and North Dakota, where the first settlers were driven off by drought. But as a rule he lost little by bad debts. Immigrants of twenty nationalities swarmed westward upon the free land offered to them by the United States Government, and usually each man found waiting for him at the nearest town one of the McCormick agents, ready to supply him with a Reaper, whether he had the money to pay for it or not. As may be imagined, the effect of this policy upon the settlement and welfare of the West was magical. There are to-day tens of thousands of Western farmers who date the era of their prosperity from the day when a McCormick Reaper arrived in all the glory of its red paint and shining blade, and held its first reception in the barn-yard.

One instance of this deserves to be embodied in the history of the Reaper. In 1855 a poor tenant farmer, who had been evicted from his rented land in Ayrshire, Scotland, arrived with his family at the banks of the Mississippi. There was then no railroad nor stage-coach, so the whole family walked to a quarter section of land farther west, not far from where the city of Des Moines stands to-day. The first year they cut the wheat with the cradle and the scythe, and the following year they bought a McCormick Reaper. They prospered. The father went back for a visit to Ayrshire and paid all his creditors. And the eldest son, James, became first Speaker of the Iowa Legislature, then a professor in an agricultural college, and finally the founder of the Department of Agriculture in all its present completeness. To-day we know him as the Honorable James Wilson, the first official farmer of the United States.

There was one other method in the marketing of farm machinery, which seems to have been originated by McCormick--the _Field Test_. As a means of stirring up interest in an indifferent community, this was the most electrical in its effects of any plan that has ever been devised. As a pioneering advertis.e.m.e.nt, it was unsurpa.s.sed. It was nothing less than a contest in a field of ripe grain between several machines that belonged to rival manufacturers. Sometimes there were only two machines, and in one grand tournament there were forty. And all the farmers in the county were invited to come and witness the battle free of charge.

The first of these field tests occurred near Richmond in 1844. McCormick had challenged Obed Hussey, a Baltimore sailor who had invented a practical mowing-machine, and who was offering it for sale to cut grain as well as gra.s.s. In this instance McCormick won easily. The judges said that while the Hussey machine was stronger and simpler, having no reel nor divider, the McCormick Reaper was lighter, cheaper, scattered less grain, and was better at cutting grain that was wet and in its method of delivering the grain.

"Meet Hussey whenever you can and put him down," Cyrus McCormick wrote to his brothers. In one letter, written the following year, he is so enthusiastically aggressive in the pursuit of Hussey that he proposes to his brothers a grand final contest. Hussey is to be dared to sign an agreement that in case of defeat, he will pay McCormick $10,000 and become the Maryland agent for the McCormick Reaper. McCormick, on his part, is to agree that if he is beaten he will pay Hussey $10,000 and become the Virginia agent for the Hussey machine. Nothing came of this confident proposal, either because it was not put into effect by McCormick, because Hussey refused to accept it.

But the field test flourished for more than forty years. It did more in the earlier days than any other one thing to make talk about the Reaper and to move the farmers out of the old-fashioned ruts. It provided the vaudeville element which is necessary in salesmanship where people are not interested in the commodity itself. As often happens, it was in the end carried too far. It became the most costly weapon of compet.i.tion. It introduced all manner of unfairness and often violence. The most absurd tests were frequently agreed to. Mowers would be chained back to back and then forcibly torn apart. Reapers were driven into groves of saplings. Machines of special strength were made secretly. And so the warfare raged, until by general consent the field test was abandoned.

These six factors of the McCormick System became the six commandments of the farm machinery business. They were largely adopted by his compet.i.tors, and exist to-day, with the exception of the exclusive contract and the field test.

By 1850 McCormick had not only solved the problem of the Reaper; he had worked out a method of distribution. He had established a new business.

But even this was not enough. He was now beset by a swarm of manufacturers who sought to deprive him of his patents and of a business which he naturally regarded as his own. It remained to be seen whether he could stand his ground when opposed by several hundred rivals; and whether he could duplicate in the courts the victories that he had won in the fields.

CHAPTER VI

THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS

In 1848 Cyrus McCormick's original patent expired. He applied to have it extended, and at once there began one of the most extraordinary legal wars ever known in the history of the Patent Office. It continued with very little cessation until 1865. It enlisted on one side or the other the ablest lawyers of that period--such giants of the bar as Lincoln, Stanton, Seward, Douglas, Harding, Watson, d.i.c.kerson, and Reverdy Johnson. The tide of battle rolled from court to court until the final clash came in the chamber of the Supreme Court and the halls of Congress. It was perhaps the most t.i.tanic effort that any American inventor has ever made to protect his rights and to carry out the purpose of the Patent Law.

McCormick had strong reasons for believing that his patent should be extended. He was asking for no more than the Patent Office, on other occasions, had granted to other inventors. A patent was supposed to protect an inventor for fourteen years, and he had lost half of this time in making a better machine, and in finding out the best way to carry on the business. He had received from all sources nearly $24,000, and most of it had been swallowed up in expenses. He was still a poor man in 1848. He was no more than on the threshold of prosperity. And his peculiar difficulty, which gave him a special claim upon the Patent Commissioners, was the shortness of the harvest season. He had only three or four weeks in each year in which he could make experiments.

For eight years McCormick's claim was tossed back and forth like a tennis ball between the Patent Office and Congress. This delay threw the door wide open to compet.i.tion. A score of manufacturers built factories and began to make McCormick Reapers, with trifling variations and under other names. If McCormick had won his case, they would have had to pay him a royalty of $25 on each machine. Consequently, they combined against him. They hired lawyers and lobbyists, secured pet.i.tions from farmers, and raised a hue and cry that one man was "trying to impose a tax of $500,000 a year upon the starving millions of the world."

One firm of lawyers in Cincinnati sent a letter to these manufacturers in 1850, saying that, "McCormick can be beaten in the Patent Office, and must be beaten now or never. If funds are furnished us, we shall surely beat him; but if they are not furnished us, he will as certainly beat us. Please, therefore, take hold and help us to beat the _common enemy_.

The subscriptions have ranged from $100 to $1,000.... Send in also to Patent Office hundreds of remonstrances like this: We oppose the extension of C. H. McCormick's patent. He has made money enough off of the farmer."

Towards the end of this famous case, the anti-McCormick lobby at the Capitol became so rabid that Senator Brown, of Mississippi, made an indignant protest on the floor of the Senate. He said: "Why, Mr.

President, if it were not for the people out of doors, people without inventive genius, people without the genius to invent a mouse-trap or a fly-killer, who are pirating on the great invention of McCormick, there would never have been an hour's delay in granting all that he asks. I know, and I state here, in the face of the American Senate and the world, that these men have beset me at every corner of the street with their papers and their affidavits--men who have no claim to the ear of the country, men who have rendered it no service, but who have invested their paltry dollars in the production of a machine which sprang from the mind of another man; and who now, for their own gain, employ lawyers to draw cunning affidavits, to devise cunning schemes, and to put on foot all sorts of machinery to defeat McCormick."

What worried McCormick most was not this consolidation of compet.i.tors, but the fact that a few farmers had signed pet.i.tions of protest against his claim. This was "the most unkindest cut of all." But he made no attack upon them. Manufacturers he would fight, and inventors and lawyers and judges--any one and every one, if need be, except farmers.

"How can the farmers be against me?" he asked in amazement. "They save the price of the Reaper in a single harvest."

McCormick lost his suit, as he did a second time in 1859, and a third time in 1861. Not one of his patents was at any time renewed. Up to 1858 he had received $40,000 in royalties, but it had cost him $90,000 in litigation. From first to last he did not get one dollar of net profit from the protection of the Patent Office.

Many other inventors were fairly treated by Congress. Fulton, for example, was presented with a bonus of $76,300. Willmoth, who improved the turret of a battleship, received $50,000. Professor Page, for making an electric engine, was given $20,000. Morse was awarded $38,000. The patents of Goodyear, Kelly, Howe, Morse, Hyatt, Woodworth, and Blanchard were extended. The protection of inventors had been a national policy--an American tradition. In the phrasing of Daniel Webster: "The right of an inventor to his invention is a natural right, which existed before the Const.i.tution was written and which is above the Const.i.tution."

The benefit of the Reaper to the nation, and the fact that McCormick was its inventor, were admitted freely enough. Senator Johnson, of Maryland, estimated in 1858 that the Reaper was then worth to the United States $55,000,000 a year. D. P. Holloway, the Commissioner of Patents, sang an anthem of eloquent praise to McCormick in 1861. "He is an inventor whose fame, while he is yet living, has spread through the world," he said.

"His genius has done honor to his own country, and has been the admiration of foreign nations. He will live in the grateful recollection of mankind as long as the reaping-machine is employed in gathering the harvest." Then, in an abrupt postscript to so fine a eulogy, this extraordinary Commissioner adds: "But the Reaper is of too great value to the public to be controlled by any individual, and the extension of his patent is refused."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAINTING BY C. SCHUSSELE, PHILADELPHIA, 1861

ENGRAVED ON STEEL BY JOHN SARTAIN, PHILADELPHIA, 1862

MEN OF PROGRESS

STANDING, LEFT TO RIGHT: 1, Dr. W. T. G. Morton, first man to administer ether to a patient; 2, J. Bogardus, invented ring spinner (for cotton spinning), an engraving machine, and dry gas meter; 3, S. Colt, revolver; 4, Cyrus Hall McCormick, reaper; 5, Joseph Saxton, locomotive differential pulley and deep sea thermometer; 6, Peter Cooper, founder of Cooper Union and inventor machine for mortising hubs for carriage wheels; 7, Prof. J. Henry, inventor of communication by electricity; 8, E. B. Bigelow, power loom for spinning jenny.

SITTING, LEFT TO RIGHT: 1, C. Goodyear, vulcanizer of rubber; 2, J. L.

Mott, iron manufacturer and inventor; 3. Dr. E. Nott, base burner for stoves: 4, F. E. Sickles, inventor of cut-off of steam in engine; 5, S.

F. B. Morse, telegraph; 6, H. Burden, cultivator, and machine for making horseshoes; 7, R. M. Hoe, printing press; 8, I. Jennings; 9, T.

Blanchard, machine for cutting and heading tacks, and lathe for turning irregular forms: 10, E. Howe, sewing machine.]

The truth seems to be that McCormick was too strong, too aggressive, to receive fair play at the hands of any legislative body. The note of sympathy could never be struck in his favor. He personally directed his own cases. He dominated his own lawyers. And he fought always in an old-fashioned, straight-from-the-shoulder way that put him at a great disadvantage in a legal conflict. Also, he was supposed to be much richer than in reality he was. He had made money by the rise in Chicago real estate. By 1866 he had become a millionaire. And his entire fortune was a.s.sumed by opposing lawyers to be the product of the Reaper business.

It is to be said, to the lasting honor of South Carolina, that she gave a grant of money to Whitney, out of the public treasury, as a token of grat.i.tude for the invention of the cotton gin. But no wheat State ever gave, or proposed to give, any grant or vote of thanks to Cyrus McCormick for the invention of the Reaper. The business that he established was never at any time favored by a tariff, or franchise, or patent extension, or tax exemption, or land grant, or monopoly.

Single-handed he built it up, and single-handed he held it against all comers. If, as Emerson has said, an inst.i.tution is no more than "the lengthened shadow of one man," we may fairly say that the immense McCormick Company of to-day is no more than the lengthened shadow of this farm-bred Virginian.