Cyrus Mccormick Quotes

So when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder. Nearly all the American machines did things that the world earnestly wished machines to do—stamp out nails, cut stone, mold candles—but with a neatness, dispatch, and tireless reliability that left other nations blinking. Elias Howe’s sewing machine dazzled the ladies and held out the impossible promise that one of the great drudge pastimes of domestic life could actually be made exciting and fun. Cyrus McCormick displayed a reaper that could do the work of forty men—a claim so improbably bold that almost no one believed it until the reaper was taken out to a farm in the Home Counties and shown to do all that it promised it could. Most exciting of all was Samuel Colt’s repeat-action revolver, which was not only marvelously lethal but made from interchangeable parts, a method of manufacture so distinctive that it became known as “the American system.

The suggestion had come from Cyrus H. McCormick, one of America’s richest men, who’d donated $800 (about $25,000 today)—nearly half the total cost. McCormick was not only an extraordinarily wealthy individual but powerful in all the ways a man can be. At six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, he was a “massive Thor of industry

First come the dreamers, the theorists, the heroic innovators who awaken the world's brain upon a new line of thought. Then come the pioneers who solve certain parts of the problem and make suggestions that are of practical value. And then, in the fullness of time, comes one masterful man who is more of a doer than a dreamer, who works out exact combination of ideas to produce the result, and establishes the new product as a necessary part of the whole human family.