Cyrus McCormick (1809–1884), born in Virginia, was an American businessman credited with the invention of the horse-drawn mechanical reaper. His father, Robert Hall McCormick, was a Virginia farmer and inventor who began trying to design a workable mechanical reaper in 1815. During the years that followed, he continued to refine and patent various designs, but he never got his reaper to work properly. In 1831, after sixteen years of on-again off-again experimentation, Robert McCormick gave up and turned the project over to his son, Cyrus, who had already invented several agricultural devices and had a keen mechanical sense. After two months of tinkering, Cyrus purported to have developed a workable prototype. The device had a field trial in the fall of 1831, but it wasn’t until 1834 that Cyrus McCormick patented his mechanical reaper. Despite this apparent early success, he spent another ten years tinkering and refining his invention.
