McCormick claimed he had really invented his machine in 1831, but the renewal was denied. When McCormick tried to renew his patent in 1848, the US Patent Office noted that a similar machine had already been patented by Obed Hussey a few months earlier. Chicago had no paved streets at the time, but the city had the best water transportation from the east over the Great Lakes for his raw materials, as well as railroad connections to the farther west where his customers would be. Louis, Missouri, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were more established and prosperous. At the time, other cities in the midwestern United States, such as Cleveland, Ohio, St. In 1847, after their father's death, Cyrus and his brother Leander (1819–1900) moved to Chicago, where they established a factory to build their machines. He also licensed several others across the country to build the reaper, but their quality often proved poor, which hurt the product's reputation.
While he was in Washington, DC to get his 1845 patent, he heard about a factory in Brockport, New York, where he contracted to have the machines mass-produced. He received a second patent for reaper improvements on January 31, 1845.Īs word spread about the reaper, McCormick noticed orders arriving from farther west, where farms tended to be larger and the land flatter. They were all built manually in the family farm shop. He finally sold seven reapers in 1842, 29 in 1843, and 50 in 1844. Using the endorsement of his father's first customer for a machine built by McPhetrich, Cyrus continuously attempted to improve the design. He did sell one in 1840, but none for 1841. In 1839 McCormick started doing more public demonstrations of the reaper, but local farmers still thought the machine was unreliable.
The panic of 1837 almost caused the family to go into bankruptcy when a partner pulled out. The McCormick family also worked together in a blacksmith/metal smelting business. However, none were sold, because the machine could not handle varying conditions. The young McCormick was granted a patent on the reaper on June 21, 1834, two years after having been granted a patent for a self-sharpening plow. He claimed to have developed a final version of the reaper in 18 months. Cyrus McCormick held one of his first demonstrations of mechanical reaping at the nearby village of Steeles Tavern, Virginia in 1831.
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