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Purpose and benefits

Cyrus Hall McCormick had invention in his blood. He grew up with a father who was constantly inventing strange contraptions, most of which he subsequently grew tired of and abandoned. McCormick went one better. On the family farm in Walnut Grove, Rockbridge County, Virginia, McCormick perfected the design of one of his father’s crazy ideas—the mechanised reaping machine. Aged only 22, he demonstrated the machine to the amazement of the farmers who were looking on. His new venture started out as a small-scale home manufacturing operation in Virginia Valley, producing two machines in 1840. It ended up as a massive manufacturing concern, based in Chicago. In 1884, the year of his death, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company sold 54,841 harvesting machines, produced at its 160-acre Chicago plant, to farmers from the United States to Australia.