In the very earliest times, the harvester walked along and pulled the heads off by hand, leaving the stalks to stand in the field. The first improvement over this primitive method was the use of a long-bladed knife. By grasping a bunch of stalks with one hand, and using the knife with the other, a number of heads could be cut off at one stroke. A knife that was slightly curved answered better than one with a straight blade, and this led to the making of the sickle.

In the days when the sickle was king, the whole family turned out to help gather in the harvest. The women could reap quite as well as the men. It was a good day's work for one person to cut and bind into sheaves or bundles a half acre of wheat, which would yield anywhere from five to twenty bushels of grain.

The sickle gave way to the cradle, which first came into use about the time of the Revolutionary War. The cradle is merely a scythe furnished with wooden fingers running parallel with the blade. These wooden fingers hold the stalks of grain, after they have been cut off, in an upright position, and enable the cradler to lay the grain down in a neat row, with the stalks parallel, ready to be gathered into bunches and bound into sheaves.

A strong man could cut with a cradle from two to two and a half acres of wheat in a day, and a second man following along could gather it up and bind it into sheaves. The cradle was thus a great improvement over the sickle or reap hook, for it increased two to three times the amount of wheat one man could harvest. But cradling and binding grain was the very hardest work on the farm. In hot weather even the strongest men could keep at work only a part of the time. So long, then, as the cradle was the best means of harvesting, the amount of wheat that could be raised on a single farm was small. Still, the cradle continued to be the king of harvesters until almost the middle of the last century. Even to-day, wheat raised in stumpy ground, in small fields, and in orchards, is cut with a cradle.

The success of men like Watt with the steam engine, and Arkwright with the water frame, set many a man in England working on labor-saving machines. One of these, Patrick Bell of Scotland, came near making a practical reaper.

The important point to be noticed about Bell's reaper is the cutting apparatus. It is made up of twelve pairs of shears or scissors. One side of each pair of shears is fastened to the cutter bar and stands still; the other side is fastened on a pivot and vibrates back and forth, and thus cuts the grain. The reel draws the grain against the blades of the scissors, and causes it to fall, when cut, upon a moving canvas. The moving canvas carries the grain to one side, out of the way of the horses which are hitched behind the machine. In workmanship, this machine was far ahead of any reaper made in America until at least 1847. Bell's reaper was first tried in the harvest of 1828, and a public exhibition of its work was given in that year.

"This reaper," said a writer in 1852, "soon worked its way to a considerable success. . . . In the harvest of 1834 I saw several of them at work, all giving satisfaction. They were manufactured in Dundee, and thence found their way throughout the country. Four of them went to the United States of America. This renders it highly probable that they became the models from which the many so-called inventions of the American reapers have since sprung. . . . In a few cases the Bell reaper has kept in operation up to the present time."

You wonder why this machine did not come into general use, and why Bell is not called the inventor of the reaper. The cutting part of Bell's machine, as in all the early reapers, was not satisfactory. If the grain was ripe, stood up well, and was free from grass and weeds, it went satisfactorily. But if the grain was down, and there was an abundance of weeds and grass, the machine choked, running over the wheat without cutting it. As a rule, only about four fifths of a field could be harvested with this machine; the remainder had to be cut with the cradle. Again, farmers were not accustomed at that time to machinery. Besides, the fields in England were small, and labor was plentiful. English farmers did not have much trouble in harvesting what grain they could raise. There was not, for these reasons, very much encouragement in England for an inventor to make the sacrifice to perfect a machine and to educate the people to buy and use it. Still, if Bell is not to be called the inventor of the reaper, it should be granted that he made the first reaping machine used to any considerable extent.

Although Bell's reaper cut grain with some success, people went on harvesting their wheat with the sickle and cradle, almost as if his invention had not been made. But not long afterwards, a reaper was invented which, when perfected, was used in all parts of the world. This reaper took the place of the sickle and the cradle; it increased, many times, the amount of wheat raised, and it relieved the farmers of the back-breaking work of cutting and binding grain by hand. The man who took the chief part in the invention and improvement of this reaper was an American, Cyrus H. McCormick, born in 1809, near Midvale, Virginia.

Robert McCormick, the father of Cyrus, was a farmer, who, like many other farmers of the day, did other things besides farming. On his ample farm of 1800 acres, there stood a sawmill and a gristmill. There was also a blacksmith shop of goodly size, where the father not only made and repaired the tools used on the farm, but often tried his hand at invention. A reaping machine was his hobby. He was at work on this as early as 1816, and continued to busy himself with it until 1831. At the time it left his hands, the cutting part was made up of whirling saws eight to ten inches in diameter, which revolved like shears past the edge of stationary knives. A reel pressed the grain against the cutters, and pushed the cut grain upon a platform. When there was enough cut grain on the platform to make a sheaf, it was raked to the ground by a man who followed along beside the reaper. This machine was at last tested in the early harvest of 1831, but the cutter would not work.

Cyrus H. McCormick, the oldest of a family of eight children, grew up like many another country boy, familiar from childhood with farm life. He prided himself on knowing how to do every kind of farm work, and how to run and repair every bit of machinery in use. The winter months he spent in the near-by "Field School," studying reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the rest of the year was given to work, either on the farm, in the mills, or in the shop. By the time he was twenty-one, Cyrus was as big and strong as any man in all the region round about; he was a good farmer, and was skilled in the use of blacksmith tools. Like his father, he had a fondness for making things and for invention.