"McCormick wants to keep the whole reaper business to himself. He will not live and let live," said his competitors. And they had reason to say so. He did want to dominate. He wanted to make all the harvesting machines that were made--not one less. He was not at all a modern "community-of-interest" financier. He was a man of an outgrown school--a consistent individualist, not only in business, but in politics and religion as well. There was no compartment in his brain for mergers and combines--for theories of government ownership--for Higher Criticism and the new theology. He was a Benjamin Franklin commercialist, a Thomas Jefferson Democrat, and a John Knox Presbyterian. He had worked harder to establish the reaper business than any other man. He was making reapers when William Deering was five years old, and before Ralph Emerson and "Bill" Whiteley were born. He had graduated into success through a fifteen-year course in failure. The world into which he was born was as hostile to him as the Kentucky wilderness was to Daniel Boone or the Atlantic Ocean to Columbus. He was hard-fibred, because he had to be. He was the thin end of the wedge that split into fragments the agricultural obstacle to social progress. One careless writer of biographies has said that McCormick began at the foot of the ladder. This is not correct. When he began, there was no ladder. _He had to build it as he climbed._ The first man who gave battle to McCormick was an erratic genius named Obed Hussey, who, as we have seen, secured a reaper patent in 1833. No two men were ever more unlike than Hussey and McCormick. Hussey was born in Nantucket; and he had roamed the frozen North as a whaling seaman. He was inventive, poetic, and as whimsical as the weather. His delight was in working out some mechanical problem. His first invention was a machine to make pins. Soon afterward, while he was living in Cincinnati, constructing a machine to mould candles, a friend said to him: "Hussey, why don't you invent a machine to reap grain?" "Are there no such machines?" he asked in surprise. "No," said his friend, "and whoever can invent one will make a fortune." Hussey forsook his candle machine, set to work upon a reaper, and within a year had one in the fields. Then came a twenty-five-year war with McCormick, which was waged furiously in the Patent Office, the courts, and a hundred wheat-fields. Hussey won the opening battle by arriving first at the Patent Office, although his machine, as claimed by McCormick, was two years younger. By 1841 Hussey had sold reapers in five states, and ten years later he shared the honours with McCormick at the London World's Fair.