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Friday, April 21, 2017

Don't Fear the (McCormick) Reaper

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. 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. 27-30). 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.

The reaper was important,but it didn't win the Civil War

The reaper was a horse-drawn contraption for harvesting wheat and other grains. 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."

"Secretary of War Stanton said: ‘The reaper is to the North what slavery is to the
South. By taking the place of regiments of young men in western harvest fields, it
released them to do battle for the Union at the front and at the same time kept up
the supply of bread for the