Q 01/05

Which future president was hired to defend John Manny when Cyrus McCormick sued over reaper patents?

A) Rutherford B. Hayes

B) James Garfield

C) Abraham Lincoln

D) Benjamin Harrison

Answer · why

C) Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born just three days before McCormick, in February 1809. Manny's team hired him as local counsel, then shut him out and never let ...

Q 02/05

Cyrus McCormick's daughter-in-law Katharine spent her fortune funding which 1950s medical advance?

A) The polio vaccine

B) The birth control pill

C) The first kidney transplant

D) The heart-lung machine

Answer · why

B) The birth control pill

The birth control pill was developed with about $2 million of her own money. Decades earlier she had smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms out of Europe...

Q 03/05

Cyrus McCormick's son Harold married Edith, a daughter of which Gilded Age tycoon?

A) Andrew Carnegie

B) Leland Stanford

C) Cornelius Vanderbilt

D) John D. Rockefeller

Answer · why

D) John D. Rockefeller

John D. Rockefeller gained a reaper heir as a son-in-law in 1895. Edith was later treated by Carl Jung and became a Jungian analyst herself.

Q 04/05

The 1871 fire that destroyed Cyrus McCormick's Chicago factory was blamed, in legend, on whose cow?

A) Catherine O'Leary

B) Bridget Murphy

C) Margaret Sullivan

D) Mary Kelly

Answer · why

A) Catherine O'Leary

Catherine O'Leary was formally cleared by the Chicago City Council in 1997. The blaze was real enough: it destroyed McCormick's plant and 2,000 finish...

Q 05/05

Cyrus McCormick won over cash-poor farmers by letting them buy his reapers in which way?

A) By mail order

B) On credit

C) At public auction

D) By lottery

Answer · why

B) On credit

On credit was his answer to the harvest calendar: better that he wait for the money, he said, than that a farmer wait for a machine he needed.