The hundreds of thousands of binders, active in the fields of every country, have made it certain that humankind shall not want for its daily bread.

When McCormick exhibited his harvester at the London Exposition of 1851, the London Times ridiculed it as "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheel barrow, and a flying machine." Yet this same grotesque object, widely used in Canada, Argentina, Australia, South Africa, and India, becomes an engine that really holds the British Empire together.
For the forty years succeeding the Civil War the manufacture of harvesting machinery was a business in which many engaged, but in which few survived.

The wildest competition ruthlessly destroyed all but half a dozen powerful firms.

Cyrus McCormick died in 1884, but his sons proved worthy successors; the McCormick factory still headed the list, manufacturing, in 1900, one-third of all the self-binders used in the world.

The William Deering Company came next and then D.M.Osborne, J.
J.Glessner, and W.H.Jones, established factories that made existence exceedingly uncomfortable for the pioneers.