Whoever wishes to understand the making of the United States must read the life of Cyrus Hall McCormick. No other one man so truly represented the dawn of the industrial era - the grapple of the pioneer with the crudities of a new country, the replacing of muscle with machinery, and the establishment of better ways and better times in farm and city alike. - Herbert Newton Casson, Introduction Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work Beginning nearly one hundred years ago, Cyrus Hall McCormick's life spanned a daring period of this nation's industrial advancement, when great individuals did great things. To know McCormick is to know of life in the United States during the nineteenth century. With new types of businesses emerging each day in the 21st century, it is especially enlightening to discover a life so essential to the making of this nation. Herbert Newton Casson was born in Odessa, Ontario in 1869. With little elementary schooling, he turned to the world around him for education. He eventually went on to Victoria College in 1890 and earned a theology degree in 1892. As Casson began his publishing career in Boston in 1893, his attention was called to the immigrant slums. He was so shocked by the conditions he found there, he became a socialist, leading demonstrations and making friends with other young radicals of his day. During his career as a newspaper journalist at New York World, Casson interviewed the likes of then President Grover Cleveland, Guglielmo Marconi, Nikolai Tesla, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell.