Reapers developed into the reaper-binder (cuts grain and binds it in sheaves), which was in turn was replaced by the swather and then the combine harvester. The combine harvester is a machine that heads, threshes and cleans grain while moving across the field.

 

The reaper-binder, or binder was invented in 1872 by Charles Withington.

 

Cyrus McCormick had many competitors, and some of them were in the field with improved devices ahead of him, but he always held his own, either by buying up the patent for a real improvement, or else by requiring his staff to invent something to do the same work. Numerous new devices to improve the harvester were patented, but the most important was an automatic attachment to bind the sheaves with wire. This was patented in 1872, and Cyrus McCormick soon made it his own. The harvester seemed complete. One man drove the team, and the machine cut the grain, bound it in sheaves, and deposited them upon the ground.

 

The main complaint about the first harvesters were about the wire ties. When the wheat was threshed, bits of wire got into the straw, and were swallowed by the cattle; or else the bits of metal got among the wheat itself and gave out sparks in grinding, setting some mills on fire.

 

Two inventors, almost simultaneously, produced the remedy. Marquis Gorham, working for Cyrus McCormick, and John Appleby, whose invention was purchased by William Deering, one of McCormick's chief competitors, invented binders which used twine. By 1880, the self-binding harvester was complete.

 

Harvesters now needed the services of only two men, one to drive and the other to shock the bundles, and could reap twenty acres or more a day, tie the grain into bundles of uniform size, and dump them in piles of five ready to be shocked. Grain must be separated from the straw and chaff.

 

The threshing floor, on which oxen or horses trampled out the grain, was still common in George Washington's time, though it had been largely succeeded by the flail. In Great Britain several threshing machines were devised in the eighteenth century, but none was particularly successful. They were stationary, and it was necessary to bring the sheaves to them. One patent issued by the United States to Samuel Mulliken of Philadelphia, was for a threshing machine. The portable horse-powered treadmill invented in 1830 by Hiram and John Pitts of Winthrop, Maine, was coupled with a thresher, or "separator."

 

The horse-powered treadmill was later replaced by the traction engine tractor, which both transported the threshing machine from farm to farm, and when a destination was reached powered the thresher.

 

Another development was the combination harvester and thresher used on the larger farms of the West. This machine does not cut the wheat close to the ground, but the cutter-bar, over twenty-five feet in length, takes off the heads. The wheat isseparated from the chaff and automatically weighed into sacks, which are dumped as fast as two expert sewers can work. The motive power is a traction engine or else twenty to thirty horses, and seventy-five acres a day can be reaped and threshed. Often another tractor pulling a dozen wagons follows and the sacks are picked up and hauled to the granary or elevator.

 

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