But, although wheat was known to be the best food for fifty centuries, it did not until very recently, until thirty or forty years ago, become a world-food. Every community ate up its own wheat. It had little or none to sell, because, no matter how much grain the farmers planted, they could not in the eight or ten days of harvest gather more than a certain limited quantity into their barns. All that one man could do, with his wife to help him, was to snatch in enough wheat to feed ten people for a year. Each family could do no more than feed one other family and itself. This was the Tragedy of the Wheat. There was never enough of it. It was so precious that none could be sure of it except the kings and the nobilities. As for the masses of peasantry who sowed the wheat and reaped it with hand-sickles, they would almost as soon have thought of wearing diamonds as of eating white bread. Then, in 1831, came the Reaper. It was not invented in any of the older countries, nor in any of the great cities of the world. For five thousand years neither the peasants nor the kings had conceived of any better way of reaping wheat than with the sickle and the scythe. The man who had cut the Gordian knot of Famine was the son of a citizen-farmer, Cyrus Hall McCormick by name, Scotch-Irish by race, American by birth, and inventor by heredity and early training. This new machine, the Reaper, when it was full-grown into the self-binder, was equal to forty sickles. With one man to drive it, it could cut and bind enough wheat in one season to feed four hundred people. In its most highly developed form, the combined harvester and thresher, it has become so gigantic a machine that thirty-two horses are required to haul it. This leviathan cuts a fifty-foot roadway through the grain, threshes it and bags it at the rate of one bag every half-minute. And the total world production of Reapers of every sort--self-binders, mowers, headers, corn-binders, etc.,--is probably as many as 1,500,000 a year, two-thirds of them being made in the United States.