Until 1880, all went well with McCormick and the Withington self-binder. Apparently, the process of invention had ceased. The Reaper had become of age. This miraculous wire-twisting machine was working everywhere with clock-like precision, and was believed to be the best that human ingenuity could devise. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky, came the news that William Deering had made and sold 3,000 _twine_ self-binders, and that the farmers had all at once become prejudiced against the use of wire. Wire, they said, got mixed with the straw and killed their cattle. Wire fell in the wheat and made trouble in the flour-mills. Wire cut their hands. Wire cluttered up their barn-yards. They would have no more to do with wire. What they wanted and must have was _twine_. William Deering, the newcomer who had caused this disturbance, became in a flash McCormick's ablest competitor. He had entered the business eight years before with a running start, having been a successful dry goods merchant in Maine. His geneology in the harvester industry shows that he had become an active partner of E. H. Gammon in 1872. Gammon, who had formerly been a Methodist preacher in Maine, had started as an agent for Seymour and Morgan of Brockport, which firm had been licensed by McCormick in 1845. Deering was the first highly skilled business man to enter the harvester trade. He was not a farmer's son, like McCormick. He was city-bred and factory trained. And in 1880 he staked practically his whole fortune upon the making of 3,000 twine self-binders, and won. Cyrus McCormick saw at a glance that the wire self-binder must go. It was his policy to give the farmers what they wanted, rather than to force upon them an unpopular machine. So he called to his aid a mechanical genius named Marquis L. Gorham--one of those who had been lured into the quest of a self-binder by the insistence of "Pump" Carpenter. Gorham's most valuable contribution was a self-sizing device, by which all bound sheaves were made to be the same size. By the time that the grain stood ripe and yellow the following season, Gorham had prepared a twine self-binder that worked well, and McCormick, yielding to this sudden hostility against wire, pushed the Gorham machine with the full force of his great organization. This evolution of the Reaper into the twine self-binder was a momentous event. It tremendously increased the sales. There were 60,000 machines of all kinds sold in 1880, and 250,000 in 1885. And it strikingly decreased the number of manufacturers. There were a hundred or more until the appearance of the twine binder: and all but twenty-two fell out of the race. Some of these were driven out by the expensive war of patents that now ensued. But most of them gave up the contest for lack of capital. The era of big production had arrived, and the little hand-labor shops could not produce an intricate self-binder for the low price at which they were being sold.