The Romance of the Reaper Part 5

As the millions came pouring in so fast, Whiteley's head was turned and he began to run amuck. He cut loose from Warder and from his own partners, Fa.s.sler and Kelly, opened war on the Knights of Labour, built the biggest reaper factory in the world, became a railroad president, helped to corner the Chicago wheat market, backed the "Strasburg Clock"--an absurd self-binder that was as big as a pipe-organ--and came cras.h.i.+ng down in a failure that jarred the farming world from end to end.

Whiteley lost millions in this crash--and with comparative indifference.

It was never the profits that he fought for. At heart he was a sportsman rather than a money-maker. He craved the excitement of the race itself more than the prizes. To win--that was the ambition of his life. And he did not shrink from spectacular methods to accomplish his ambition.

For instance, nothing less would satisfy him, when he exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial, than a quarter-sized reaper, made daintily of rosewood and gold. This brought him so sudden a rush of orders from the East that in one day of the following year he sent seventy loaded cars to Baltimore. With flags flying and bra.s.s bands playing, these cars rolled off, with orders to travel only by daylight. When they arrived in Harrisburg, running in three sections, they caught the eye of a railroad superintendent named McCrea--who is now, by the way, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. McCrea saw a chance to advertise his railway as well as Whiteley's reapers, so he linked the seventy cars together into one three-quarter-mile train, put his biggest engine at the front, and sent the gaudy caravan on its way.

Whiteley never knew how to be commonplace, even in the smallest matters.

Wherever he went, his trail was marked by stories of his exploits and his oddities. How he organised the famous "White Plug Hat Brigade" in the Blaine campaign--how he made a twelve-hour speech to help "Mother" Stewart close up the saloons of Springfield--how he found a Springfield farmer using a McCormick reaper, gave him a Whiteley reaper in its place, and flung the rival machine upon the junk-pile, as a sign that he was the monarch of Ohio--how he gathered up a peck of pies after a field test dinner, put them in a sack, and ate nothing but pies for half a week--such is the sort of anecdotes that his life has added to the folklore of the Western farmers.

Many a time his vaudeville tactics disgusted and enraged his fellow manufacturers; but he was too big a factor to be ignored. Once, when a number of reaper kings had met together to see if they could rescue their business from its riot of rivalry, the chairman opened the discussion with the question--"What ought we to do to improve the conditions of our trade?" For a moment there was silence, and then John P. Adriance--as mild-natured a man as ever lived--said blandly, "Kill Whiteley."

With daring originality Whiteley combined a tremendous physical vitality and a brain that fairly effervesced with inventiveness. He probably holds the record among the reaper-men for inventions, with 125 patents in his name. And he would work twenty-four hours at a stretch, without a yawn.

One evening he asked a young machinist to remain in the factory and help him fix a refractory reaper. After working till midnight Whiteley said: "Well, Jim, I suppose you think you are tired. Go home and have a good night's sleep, and come back here in three hours."

He dashed with fanatical energy into any undertaking that appealed to his imagination. Once, when he had too much money, he bought control of a new railway that ran through Ohio from Springfield to Jackson,--160 miles. He wanted to know its real value, so, instead of asking the directors a few questions, as other men would have done, Whiteley travelled over the entire length of the railroad, _on foot_.

When I saw Whiteley, last June, he was time-worn and whitened. Since the great failure, he has been in the harvester business only intermittently.

He has long outlived his Golden Age, but he is as busy as ever, with a new scheme and a new factory. And he still wears the Scotch cap and long boots that have been familiar at field tests for more than half a century.

Of the other Springfield men, Warder was unquestionably the ablest. "He was the main wheel," said Whiteley. As a young man of twenty-seven he was running a sawmill in Springfield when he first heard of the reaper. He was so impressed with its possibilities that he offered the inventor $30,000 for a share in it.

"Young Warder is crazy," said Springfield people, for at that time $30,000 was a fortune and a reaper was a fad. But thirty-five years later, when Warder had removed to Was.h.i.+ngton and become noted among its social entertainers, his investment had multiplied itself very nearly two hundredfold.

Warder had a.s.sociated with him two partners, Asa S. Bushnell and J. J.

Glessner. Bushnell began earning his living in boyhood as a clerk at $5 a month, and stumbled into a business career as a druggist. Then he became Warder's understudy, and piled up twice as many millions as he could count on his fingers. As a climax he rose higher in public life than any other reaper king, by serving twice as the Governor of Ohio. As for J. J.

Glessner, he is still active, and one of the dozen solid pillars upon which the International Harvester Company is built.

Such were the strong men whom William Deering faced when he came, without a shred of experience, into the harvester world. He had no ancient patent-rights, like McCormick. He could not outrace thirty compet.i.tors in a wheat-field, like Whiteley and Jones and Adriance and Osborne. One way was left open to him.

"I'll beat them," he said, "by making a better machine."

He set out upon such a search for improvements that, during the rest of his life, inventors fluttered around him like moths around a candle. Until 1879, the best harvester was a self-binder that tied the sheaves with wire. It was the invention of Sylva.n.u.s D. Locke, and had been developed to its highest point of perfection by a farm-bred inventor named C. B.

Withington, who is still living in Wisconsin. The Withington machine was pushed by McCormick with great energy, and fifty thousand were sold between 1877 and 1885. It was a marvelously simple mechanism, consisting mainly of two steel fingers that moved back and forth, and twisted a wire band around each sheaf of grain. As a machine it was a complete success; but the farmers disliked it.

"The wire will mix with the straw," they said, "and our horses and cattle will be killed."

So, when Deering met John F. Appleby, a stocky mechanic who claimed to have invented a twine self-binder, he at once set him to work upon fifty of the new machines.

When Deering saw his first Appleby binder at work in a field of wheat, he was enthralled. Here, at last, was the perfect harvester. Its strong steel arms could flash a cord around a bundle of grain, tie a knot, cut the cord, and fling off the sheaf, too quickly for the eye to follow. It seemed magical.

"What am I to do?" asked the farmer who bought the first of these machines, as he climbed upon the seat and prepared to cut his grain.

"Do!" exclaimed John Webster, the Deering mechanic. "Do nothing! DRIVE THE HORSES."

The amazed farmer started the horses, drove around the field, and came back swinging his hat and shouting like a lunatic--as well he might. For in the trail of his harvester the sheaves lay bound, as though there were some kindly genie hidden among its wheels.

Deering owned, at that time, not much more than a million dollars--the gleanings of thirty-five industrious years. But he resolved to stake it all upon this amazing machine. If he lost--he would be a poor man at fifty-three. If he won--he would be the harvester king of the world.

"I'll move the factory to Chicago and make 3,000 of these Appleby twine-binders at once," he said.

His partner, E. H. Gammon, held back, so the inflexible Deering bought him out, and from that day he, like his greatest compet.i.tor, McCormick, ran a one-man business.

"Did you hear the news about Deering?" gossiped his fellow manufacturers.

"Clean crazy on a twine-binder!"

And, far more discouraging, the magical self-binder itself suddenly became ill-humored and refused to form its sheaves properly. It was no easy exploit, as any one may see, to make the first 3,000 of such complex machines. No other artificial mechanism must so combine strength and delicacy. No piano nor Hoe press, for instance, is expected to operate while it is being jerked over a rough field or along the steep slant of a hill.

One day in the early spring of 1880, Deering and his chief lieutenants--Steward and Dixon--were in a field of rye near Alton, trying to coax the new harvester to do its work. All day long it was obstinate and perverse, and the men were at their wits' end.

"Well, boys," said Deering, "if we can't do better than this, I'll lose $1,000,000."

"Try one more day," said Steward. They went to their hotel, and as it happened to be crowded, the three were placed in a large double room.

"Steward and Dixon were mad at me the next morning," said Deering, when he told me of that critical occasion. "They had nothing at stake, yet they had lain awake all night; while I was apparently about to lose my only million, and had slept like a log."

That day a slight change was made, and the harvester became good-natured and obedient. The whole 3,000 machines were sold, and created as much excitement as 3,000 miracles. They swept away compet.i.tors like chaff. Of a hundred manufacturers seventy-eight were winnowed out. Instead of losing his fortune, Deering cleared at once about four hundred thousand dollars, for profits were large in those experimental days. Better still, he became an acknowledged leader of his cla.s.s. He had taken the right line of development, as McCormick had in 1831, and all others who could, choked down their rage and followed--quick march!

The man who had found the right path was John F. Appleby. He was the scout--the Kit Carson of the harvester business. It was he--the inspired farm labourer of Wisconsin--who had hurled another great impossibility out of the way of the world's farmers.

He did not of course originate the whole self-binder. But he put the parts together in the right way and pushed ahead to success through a wilderness of failure. There was a notable group of inventors in Rockford who did much to put him on the right track. One of these, Marquis L. Gorham, was the originator of the self-sizing device that regulates the size of the bound sheaf. Another, named Jacob Behel, invented a knotter, whittling it out of a branch of a cherry tree.

Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-errant of industry. He takes his pay in adventure. He dislikes to travel with the crowd. When I saw him first, in his Chicago workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-binders.

He was engaged on the task of perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes will do as much for the South as his self-binder did for the West. And it was with some difficulty that I could persuade him to disentangle the story of the twine-binder from the various other romances of his life.

In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster doing ch.o.r.es on a farm for one dollar a week. Even this rate of pay was too high to the mind of the farmer who employed him; for he was always whittling and making toy machinery, instead of minding his work.

One day, when Appleby was seventeen, he was binding grain after a reaper.

"How do you like the work, Jack?" asked the farmer.

"I don't like it," said Jack, "and what's more, I believe I can invent a machine to tie these bundles."

"Ho! ho!" laughed the farmer. "You little fool, you can't invent anything."

Twenty-five years later, when Appleby had made half a million by his invention, and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis, he noticed an old man pus.h.i.+ng a wheelbarrow in the factory yard.

"Haven't I seen you before?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," replied the old man. "I was the farmer who gave you your first job."

"Well," said Appleby, "you see I wasn't a little fool after all."

Appleby actually had set to work to invent a knotting-machine when he was a farm-boy of seventeen, and had made his first model at that age--in 1858. A young school-teacher named Chester W. Houghton was the first man who put money back of the boy's invention. He stood behind it to the extent of fifty dollars, and then became alarmed at such a reckless speculation, and quit. Had he been just a little more adventurous, and a little more patient, every dollar of his investment would have fruited into a thousand.

When the school-teacher deserted him, and wanted the fifty dollars back, Appleby was discouraged. The models that had been made at a gun shop in Palmyra, Wisconsin, drifted about. They were sold at auction on one occasion for seventeen cents; and the buyer thought they were not worth even that, for he made a present of them to Appleby. Then came the crash of the Civil War. Appleby enlisted, and for four years forgot knotters and thought only of guns.

Yet while he lay in the trenches at Vicksburg, he whittled out a new device for rifles. After the war, a capitalist saw this device, gave him $500 for it, and then, before Appleby's eyes, sold a half interest in it for $7,000. This awakened Appleby to the value of inventions and made him an inventor for life.

Once more he set to work on his long-neglected grain-binder, and in 1867 he drove his first completed machine into a field near Mazomanie, Wisconsin. The horses were fractious, and after being jerked along for several rods, the machine broke down, to the great delight of the spectators, most of whom knew Appleby and regarded him as a crank. But the machine had bound a couple of sheaves before it broke. Appleby displayed these, and one man--Dr. E. D. Bishop--pulled a roll of money from his pocket and handed it to the inventor.