McCormick Harvesting Machine Company
McCormick Harvesting Machine Company was an American manufacturer of agricultural machinery.
The company was founded in Baltimore , Maryland in 1884 and existed until 1902. The successor company International Harvester Company (IHC) was created through the merger with Deering Harvester Company . The McCormick brand remained within IHC until IHC was taken over by Case Corporation in 1985 , which sold its tractors under its own Case IH brand. In 2000, the Italian Argo Group acquired the rights to the McCormick brand and the Doncaster production facility from Case IH and founded McCormick Tractors International Ltd in 2001 .
Company history
In 1831, 22-year-old Cyrus McCormick built a self-developed grain sheaf mower (Reaper), a forerunner of the grain binder, based on his father's design plans . This Virginia Reaper was patented in 1834 . In 1847 he moved his successful workshop to Chicago in order to deliver his machines to the entire agricultural Midwest from there . The machine factory produced 500 McCormick reapers for the 1848 harvest season and over 1,500 for the 1849 season, although patent protection was lifted during this time and around 30 mower suppliers came onto the American market by 1850. In 1851, his horse-drawn mowers and those invented by his competitor Obed Hussey were shown at the first world exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London. In 1856, Cyrus took his brothers William and Leander into the company, creating the forerunner of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. In that year over 4,000 mowing machines were sold, in 1862 33,000 and by 1864 a total of 250,000 machines had been sold.
The machines have been continuously developed from the start. In 1857 McCormick registered a patent for a mower with a driver's seat and in 1858 the patent for a mower with an automatic rake followed , which he had bought from the impoverished Obed Hussey, who had been his greatest adversary since 1834.
In 1855, McCormick expanded to the European market and began producing his grain mower in England. In 1863 Cyrus McCormick demonstrated his grain mower in Hamburg. He stayed in Germany for several weeks and demonstrated the use of his machines to the interested public. The first German branch was founded in Berlin in 1900 under the direction of JA Hutmacher. In 1902, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Corporation, Deering Harvester Company, Plano Harvester Co., Milwaukee Harvester Co. and Warder, Bushnell & Glessner Co. merged to form the International Harvester Company .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Frances and Joseph Gies: The Ingenious Yankees. The men, ideas, and machines that transformed a nation, 1776-1886 , Crowell, New York 1976, pp. 187-201: Obed Hussey and Cyrus McCormick: Mechanization of Agriculture
- ↑ Development of the McCormick harvesters ( Memento from June 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Vishal Mangalwadi: The Book of the Middle. Fontis, Basel 2014, page 438