![]() ![]() READ MORE STORIES ON BLACKAMERICAWEB. ![]() His efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr., with the aid of Jo Anderson, who was enslaved by the family. He was, however, one of several designing engineers who produced successful models in the 1830s. When McCormick freed Anderson before the Civil War, Anderson couldn’t live freely so he worked for farming neighbors at a rate of $60 per month which McCormick paid until his death. McCormick has been simplistically credited as the single inventor of the mechanical reaper. Another account that Anderson and McCormick were just a year apart in age and were more like brothers than slaves. This family account has been supported by descendants of the McCormicks many times over. In 1931, Cyrus McCormick II, the grandson of Cyrus McCormick, wrote in his book The Century Of The Reaper that Anderson should have been noted as a co-inventor of the device. The McCormick reaper legend : The true story of a great invention Lyons, Norbert on. The cotton gin, which was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, was a machine that separated the seeds from raw cotton fiber, greatly increasing the efficiency of the process and making it possible to produce larger quantities of cotton. The device was patented in 1834, and was largely seen as an updated version of earlier versions of the reaper that were invented in Scotland and other locales. The McCormick reaper harvested grain faster and made wheat cheaper. Beginning in 1831, 22-year-old Cyrus McCormick continued his father’s failed quest to produce a mechanical reaper design. The machine’s speed increased crop yields, decreased the number of farmhands needed and helped turn the Midwest into the nation’s breadbasket. During this month in 1831, McCormick and Anderson debuted their version of the reaper with both men showing of its capabilities to speed up the harvest collection. McCormick’s reaper could cut more wheat in a day than a half-dozen farmhands. ![]()
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