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The Age of Big Business; a chronicle of the captains of industry by Burton Jesse Hendrick
page 104 of 132 (78%)
strange red chariot, which, with practically no expenditure of
human labor, easily did the work of a dozen men. Many as have
been America's contributions to civilization, hardly any have
exerted greater influence in promoting human welfare than her
gift of agricultural machinery. It seems astounding that, until
McCormick invented his reaper, in 1831, agricultural methods, in
both the New and the Old World, differed little from those that
had prevailed in the days of the Babylonians. The New England
farmer sowed his fields and reaped his crops with almost
identically the same instruments as those which had been used by
the Roman farmer in the time of the Gracchi. Only a comparatively
few used the scythe; the great majority, with crooked backs and
bended knees, cut the grain with little hand sickles precisely
like those which are now dug up in Etruscan and Egyptian tombs.

Though McCormick had invented his reaper in 1831, and though many
rival machines had appeared in the twenty years preceding the
Civil War, only the farmers on the great western plains had used
the new machinery to any considerable extent. The agricultural
papers and agricultural fairs had not succeeded in popularizing
these great laborsaving devices. Labor was so abundant and so
cheap that the farmer had no need of them. But the Civil War took
one man in three for the armies, and it was under this pressure
that the farmers really discovered the value of machinery. A
small boy or girl could mount a McCormick reaper and cut a dozen
acres of grain in a day. This circumstance made it possible to
place millions of soldiers in the field and to feed the armies
from farms on which mature men did very little work. But the
reaper promoted the Northern cause in other ways. Its use
extended so in the early years of the war that the products of
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