nation and the nation’s armies. Thus, without
McCormick’s invention I feel the North could not win and the Union would have
been dismembered.’"

Ott argues persuasively that this quotation is incorrect. Apparently, Edwin Stanton was a patent attorney before he became Secretary of War for President Lincoln, and he was arguing in court in 1861 that McCormick's reaper deserved an extension of his patent term. Ott quotes a 1905 biography of
Edwin Stanton, written by Frank A. Flower, which included the following quotation attributed to an 1861 patent case, in which Stanton argued:

"The reaper is as important to the North as slavery to the South. It takes the place
of the regiments of young men who have left the harvest fields to do battle for the
Union, and thus enables the farmers to keepthe early 1840s, Hussey had sold more reapers than McCormick. But the idea of a mechanical reaper had been in the air for some time. Joseph Gies offered some background in "The Great Reaper War," published in the Winter 1990 issue of Invention & Technology. Gies wrote:

"In 1783 Britain’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce offered a gold medal for a practical reaper. The idea seemed simple: to use traction, via suitable gearing, to provide power to move some form of cutting mechanism. By 1831 several techniques had been explored, using a revolving reel of blades, as in a hand lawn mower; a rotating knifeedged disk, as in a modern power mower; and mechanical scissors. Robert McCormick had tried using revolving beaters to press the