When McCormick exhibited his harvester at the London Exposition of 1851, the London Times ridiculed it as " a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheel barrow, and a flying machine" .
Along the walls on the village side all was dusty, the wriggling vines, the lemon and eucalyptus trees, the casual wheel-barrow, left only a moment since, but already grown into the path, atrophied and faintly rotten.