Cyrus McCormick

Cyrus Hall McCormick, who lived from 15 February 1809 to 13 May 1884, was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902; originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he and many members of his family became prominent residents of Chicago. McCormick always claimed sole credit as the inventor of the mechanical reaper, though he was one of several engineers producing working models in the 1830s, building on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr with the aid of Jo Anderson, an enslaved African American man held by the family; McCormick's own lasting achievement was building a company with manufacturing, marketing and a sales force capable of bringing the reaper to market at scale.