Robert McCormick (Virginia inventor)
Robert Hall McCormick was an American inventor who invented numerous devices including a version of the reaper which his eldest son Cyrus McCormick patented in 1834 and became the foundation of the International Harvester Company. Although he lived his life in rural Virginia, he was patriarch of the McCormick family that became influential throughout the world, especially in large cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Robert McCormick (Virginia inventor)
A reaper is a farm implement or person that reaps crops at harvest when they are ripe. Usually the crop involved is a cereal grass. The first documented reaping machines were Gallic reapers that were used in Roman times in what would become modern-day France. The Gallic reaper involved a comb which collected the heads, with an operator knocking the grain into a box for later threshing.
Typical 20th-century reaper, a tractor-drawn Fahr machine
A reaper cutting rye in Germany in 1949
1900 ad for McCormick farm machines--your boy can operate them
McCormick's reaper at a presentation in Virginia