Not far from 12,000 patents on harvesting machines were granted in this country in the fifty years following McCormick's invention, and more than two hundred companies were formed to compete for the market.
McCormick always regarded these competitors as highwaymen who had invaded a field which had been almost divinely set apart for himself.

A man of covenanting antecedents, heroic in his physical proportions, with a massive, Jove-like head and beard, tirelessly devoted to his work, watching every detail with a microscopic eye, marshaling a huge force of workers who were as possessed by this one overruling idea as was McCormick himself, he certainly presented an almost unassailable battlefront to his antagonists.

The competition that raged between McCormick and the makers of rival machines was probably the fiercest that has prevailed in any American industry.

For marketing his machine McCormick developed a system almost as ingenious as the machine itself.
The popularization of so ungainly and expensive a contrivance as the harvester proved a slow and difficult task.

McCormick at first attempted to build his product on his Virginia farm and for many years it was known as the Virginia Reaper.