New York Custom involved handling more cash than any other on earth, $ 15 million in 1829.
It was the genius of Cyrus McCormick which led to the marketing of the first mass produced reaper. He was of Ulster origin, who came from Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley, then to Brockport, New York, on the Erie Canal, to be nearer the markets, and finally to Chicago in 1848. He was not merely a great inventor but a remarkable businessman. He sold his first reaper in 1834. At the International Exposition in Paris in 1855, to the astonishment of the Europeans, an American reaper cut an acre of oats in twenty-one minutes, a third of the time taken by Continental makes. The quantity of these giant, reliable machines, made possible by intense competition, explains why American grain was so cheap, outselling all Europeans products whenever it could get under the tariff and quota barrier.
American inventors and farmers were the first to power farm machinery with steam.
In 1803 Americans were the first in the world to apply steam to a sawmill.
The beginning of a vast manufacturing complex stretching from Wilmington to New York. From 1840 to 1860 this megalopolis was the most rapidly growing large industrial area in the world.
When the Union forces abandoned the naval yard at Portsmouth, Virginia, at the beginning of the war, they scuttled a new frigate Merrimac. The Confederates raised it, renamed it Virginia, and clad it in iron. It met the Union ironclad Monitor in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, in an inconclusive five-hour duel, the first battle of iron ships in history.
