Cyrus McCormick Business Magnate

Robert McCormick Who REALLY Invented the Reaper

Cyrus McCormick left a legacy as one of the most visible, vocal, forceful, and materially successful capitalists of the Industrial Revolution.

Even though he fashioned a starring role for himself in the "McCormick legend" as the inventor of the mechanical reaper who rescued all of mankind from Malthusian starvation, he actually wasn't much of an inventor.

McCormick was an INNOVATOR of the first order, and he had the outsized ego to match.

Today, a reaper sounds so prosaic. But McCormick built out of nothing an entirely new business paradigm of mass production and mass marketing. His innovations allowed Big Agriculture to take hold of American foodways.

McCormick's business model put the United States at the center of international trade in food commodities for more than a century.

And the reaper in its heyday was regarded as necessary to our nation's economic well being as is high-speed internet access today.