The reaper by this time had taken away fully half the hard work of the harvest. There remained only the binding of the bunches of cut grain about the middle with a straw rope, so that the grain could be easily handled. This, to be sure, was back-breaking toil, but most of the farmers thought it would always have to be done by hand. "How can a machine ever gather the grain into bundles and tie bands about them?" they would ask.

An inventor by the name of Mann fitted a McCormick reaper, in 1849, with a canvas elevator, to carry the cut grain up into a wagon moving along beside the machine. Nine years later, two brothers by the name of Marsh were using a machine of this kind, when one asked the other, "Why should the grain be carried up to the wagon? Why can't we put a platform on the side of the machine to stand on, make a table all round to work on, and bind the grain as fast as it comes up?"

By the next harvest, the Marsh boys had their new rigging arranged. As they expected, they could bind grain nearly three times as fast as before. One of the brothers bound a whole acre by himself, in fifty-five minutes. They patented their device, and called it the Marsh harvester.

The Marsh harvester cut the cost of binding grain in two. The binders had no longer to walk from bundle to bundle, nor were they compelled to stoop over, each time they bound a sheaf. They could stand still and straight at their work. Two men could do what before it took five or six to do. Strange as it may seem, the Marsh harvester was not at first popular. The farmers called it a "man killer." The farm hands dubbed it the "Weary Willie." Like all good things, it soon won its way, and for more than ten years was the king of harvesters.

Besides reducing the cost and the drudgery of binding grain, the Marsh harvester was a long step towards what the farmers said could never be done. All that was now needed to do "the impossible" was to teach the Marsh harvester to twist a wire or to tie a knot.

In the winter of 1874, Charles Withington, of Janesville, Wisconsin, carried to McCormick at Chicago a new invention. It was a remarkable device. Two steel arms caught a bundle of grain between them, put a wire tightly around the bundle, and fastened the two ends of the wire together by a twist. This was the long sought self-binder, the very thing the farmer said could never be made. A wire self-binder was built and tested in the following July. It cut fifty acres of wheat, and bound almost every bundle without a slip. Within the next five years, McCormick alone made and sold fifty thousand of these machines.

This was the end of harvest drudgery. Sickles, cradles, rakers, binders, each in turn were set free. From this time on, all that was needed was a man or a good-sized boy to drive the team and to manage the machine. The machine cut the grain, bound it into sheaves, collected these on a carrier, and dropped them to the ground, ready to be placed in shocks,—all without the aid of the human hand.

There was one defect in the wire binder, which proved to be its undoing. The wire mixed with the straw got into the mouths of the cattle, and at times killed them. Pieces of wire mixed in the grain cut the hands of those handling it. So, while the farmers were delighted with the self-binder, they disliked the wire.

At the very time the wire binder seemed to be most secure in its position in the harvester world, John Appleby, of Wisconsin, took to William Deering, the chief maker of the Marsh harvester, an invention which he claimed could tie a knot more quickly and more securely than was ever done by sailor.

Deering knew the dislike of the farmers for wire.

"Here," he said to himself, "is the device to make the perfect binder, a binder that will use twine." And he forthwith accepted the new device without the slightest hesitation.

During the winter of 1880, word went about among the makers of binders that "Deering is crazy over a twine binder. Why, he is making three thousand of them."

Before the harvest of 1880 was over, the shoe was on the other foot, for Deering not only made, but he sold his three thousand twine binders, at a profit of one hundred thousand dollars.

By the next harvest almost every manufacturer was in the field with a twine binder, most of them paying a royalty to Appleby. The wire binder passed away almost as quickly as a summer shower. The twine binder took its place, and it is to-day the standard binder of the world.

With one of these machines, having almost human skill, a sixteen-year-old boy can harvest as much grain as a dozen strong men could harvest with the cradle, or even forty with the sickle.

The final step in the improvement of the reaper was the invention of the complete harvester, which is really a harvester and thrasher in one machine. The complete harvesters are used, in our own country, chiefly on the Pacific Coast. They are great machines drawn by thirty to forty horses, or by an engine. They cut a swath from twenty to twenty-five feet wide, and a single machine will cut, thrash, clean, and sack from seventy-five to a hundred acres of grain in a day, all at a cost of not more than forty cents an acre.

McCormick lived until 1884. He thus saw the reaper grow, from the time when he drove that crude machine back to the old blacksmith shop in July, 1831, until it reached its full maturity in the self-binder of to-day. With his own hand, he added the improvements which first made the reaper a success; in his own time, he was always the largest single maker of reapers, and he did more than anyone else to carry the reaper to Europe and the other countries of the world.

Chiefly because of the reaper, the amount of wheat produced in the world has increased by leaps and bounds, until it now amounts to about four billion bushels a year. To handle this enormous crop, great elevators are built along rairoads, at rairoad centers, and at seaports. A single elevator, like the "Jumbo" at Minneapolis, holds six million bushels. To grind this wheat, thousands of flour mills have been erected, some of which are so large that a single mill grinds seventeen thousand barrels of flour in twenty-four hours. Even the making of reapers has in itself become a great industry. One harvester company alone gives regular employment to an army of twenty-five thousand men and women.