Had these four men been brought face to face, the Harvester Company would probably never have been formed.
Having once signed their names, however, these once antagonistic interests had little difficulty in forming a strong combination.

The company thus brought together manufactured 85 per cent of all the farm machinery used in this country.

It owned its own coal-fields and iron mines and its own forests, and it produces most of the implements used by 10,000,000 farmers.

In 1847 Cyrus McCormick made 100 reapers and sold them for $10,000; by 1902 the annual production of the corporation amounted to hundreds of thousands of harvesters--besides an almost endless assortment of other agricultural tools, ploughs, drills, rakes, gasoline engines, tractors, threshers, cream separators, and the like--and the sales had grown to about $75,000,000.

This is merely the financial measure of progress; the genuine achievements of McCormick's invention are millions of acres of productive land and a farming population which is without parallel elsewhere for its prosperity, intelligence, manfulness, and general contentment..