![]() ![]() New innovations can bring conflict over intellectual property But it appears plausible that the he argued as a patent attorney in 1861 that the McCormick reaper deserved a patent because it could help to with the Civil War, and that comment was later transmuted by a corporate public relations department into a claim that Secretary of War Stanton credited the reaper with actually winning the Civil War. There doesn\’t seem to be any documentary evidence directly from the 1860s on what Stanton said. McCormick’s invention will aid materially to prevent the Union from dismemberment, and to grant his prayer herein is the smallest compensation the Government can make.\” 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 keep up the supply of bread for the nation and its armies. \”The reaper is as important to the North as slavery to the South. Flower, which included the following quotation attributed to an 1861 patent case, in which Stanton argued: Ott quotes a 1905 biography of Edwin Stanton, written by Frank A. 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 argues persuasively that this quotation is incorrect. Thus, without McCormick’s invention I feel the North could not win and the Union would have been dismembered.’\” 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 nation and the nation’s armies. \”Secretary of War Stanton said: ‘The reaper is to the North what slavery is to the South. However, Daniel Peter Ott in a 2014 PhD dissertation on \” Producing a Past: Cyrus McCormick\’s Reaper from Heritage to History.\” Ott traces the claim that the reaper helped to win the Civil War back to some promotional materials for the centennial celebration of the reaper in 1931 produced by International Harvester which included this statement: 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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