Rhodes quotes the historian William Hutchinson who wrote: \”Of all the inventions during the first half of the nineteenth century which revolutionized agriculture, the reaper was probably the most important,\” because it removed the bottleneck of needing to hire lots of extra workers at harvest time, and thus allowed a farmer \”to reap as much as he could sow.\”īut somewhere along the way, I had imbibed a larger myth, that the labor saving properties of the reaper helped the North to with the Civil War by allowing young men who would otherwise have been needed for the harvest to become soldiers. The reaper was a horse-drawn contraption for harvesting wheat and other grains. The reaper was important, but it didn\’t win the Civil War Here, I\’ll lay out some of the lessons which caught my eye, which in places will sound similar to modern issues concerning innovation and intellectual property. Karl Rhodes tells the story of the arguments over who invented the reaper and the wars over patent rights in \” Reaping the Benefits of the Reaper,\” which appears in the Econ Focus magazine published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (Third/Fourth Quarter 2016, pp. The McCormick reaper is one of the primary labor-saving inventions of the early 19th century, and at a time when many people are expressing concerns about how modern machines are going to make large numbers of workers obsolete, it\’s a story with some lessons worth remembering.
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