The Reaping Machine

The process of harvesting wheat was a very labor intensive process. You have to start by reaping the entire field of wheat which you could do one of three ways. The first is reaping by hand which is where you pick all the tops of the wheat by hand and put them in a basket. You repeat this for the entire field of wheat which would take you all day long and sometimes the next day would be devoted to picking wheat as well. The second way to do this is to have a sickle which is an especially designed curved blade which lets you reap more and faster but it would still take you a full day to clear the field. The third way to reap a field is to use a scythe which is basically a sickle blade on the side of a long stick. This is the fastest way to clear a field of wheat because it has more reach than the sickle. when you have reaped the field you then have to thresh the wheat which is very hard work because you have to take a large bat and beat the wheat until all the little seeds fall out which takes an hour for each bundle and there would be many, many more bundles of wheat. Then there is the winnowing which is where you take the pile of seeds and the papery chaff which was the shell on the seeds, throw them in the air and since the seeds are heavier than the chaff the seeds fall right in the basket and the chaff floats down slowly. A man named Cyrus McCormick made and patented a reaping machine that could reduce the time for reaping from more than a day to a few hours. He then lost his patent in a legal case making him have to rely on the market which made him decide to give free tests before receiving the money and in this way he got more money and farmers got more money by selling more wheat and there was more food overall.