He was resolved from the first not to be robbed and flung aside as most inventors had been. Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, had said in 1812: "The whole amount I have received is not equal to the value of the labor saved in one hour by my machines now in use." Fulton had died at fifty, plagued and plundered by imitators. Kay, Jacquard, Heathcoat, and Hargreaves, inventors of weaving machinery, were mobbed. Arkwright's mill was burned by incendiaries. Gutenberg, Cort, and Jethro Wood lost their fortunes. Palissy was thrown into the Bastile. And Goodyear, who gave us rubber, Bottgher, who gave us Sèvres porcelain, and Sauvage, who gave us the screw propeller, died in poverty and neglect. But Cyrus McCormick was more than an inventor. He was a business-builder. In the same resolute, deliberate way in which he had made his Reaper, he now set to work to make a business. He planned and figured and made experiments. "His whole soul was wrapped up in his Reaper," said one of the neighbors. Once while riding home on horseback in the Summer of 1832, his horse stopped to drink in the centre of a stream, and as he looked out upon the fields of yellow grain, shimmering in the sunlight, the dazzling thought flashed upon his brain, "Perhaps I may make a million dollars from this Reaper." As he said in a letter written in later years: "This thought was so enormous that it seemed like a dream-like dwelling in the clouds--so remote, so unattainable, so exalted, so visionary." His first step was seemingly a mistake, though it must have contributed much toward the development of self-reliance and hardihood in his own character. He received a tract of land from his father, and proceeded with might and main to farm it alone. There was a small log house on his land, and here he lived with two aged negro servants and his Reaper. He needed money to buy iron--to advertise--to appoint agents. And he had no means of earning money except by farming. It is very evident that he had not set aside his purpose to make Reapers, for we find in the _Lexington Union_ of September 28, 1833, the first advertisement of his machine. He offers Reapers for sale at $50.00 apiece, and gives four testimonials from farmers. But nothing came of this advertisement. No farmer came forward to buy. The four men who had given testimonials had only seen the Reaper at work. They were not purchasers. McCormick was "a voice crying in the wilderness" for _nine years_ before he found a farmer who had the money and the courage to buy one of his Reapers.