Eli Whitney is most famous for two innovations which will divide the United States in the mid-nineteenth century: the cotton gin (1793) and his advocacy of interchangeable parts.
In the South, the cotton gin revolutionizes the way cotton was harvested and reinvigorates slavery.
The cotton gin is a mechanical device that removes the seeds from cotton, a process that had previously been extremely labor intensive.
The word 'gin' is short for engine.
The cotton gin is a wooden drum stuck with hooks that pulls the cotton fibers through a mesh.
The cotton seeds will not fit through the mesh and fall outside.
Whitney occasionally tells a story wherein he was pondering an improved method of seeding the cotton when he was inspired by observing a cat attempting to pull a chicken through a fence, and could only pull through some of the feathers.
A single cotton gin can generate up to fifty-five pounds (twenty-five kilograms) of cleaned cotton daily.
This contributes to the economic development of the Southern states of the United States, a prime cotton growing area; some historians believe that this invention allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable at a critical point in its development.
Whitney receives a patent (later numbered as X72) for his cotton gin on March 14, 1794; however, it will not be validated until 1807.
Whitney and his partner Miller had not intended to sell the gins.
Rather, like the proprietors of grist and sawmills, they expected to charge farmers for cleaning their cotton – two-fifths of the value, paid in cotton.
Resentment at this scheme, the mechanical simplicity of the device and the primitive state of patent law, had made infringement inevitable.
Whitney and Miller cannot build enough gins to meet demand, so gins from other makers find ready sale.
Ultimately, patent infringement lawsuits consume the profits and their cotton gin company goes out of business in 1797.
One often overlooked point is that there were drawbacks to Whitney's first design.
There is significant evidence that the design flaws were solved by plantation owner Catherine Littlefield Greene, to whom Whitney give no public credit or recognition.
While the cotton gin has not earned Whitney the fortune he had hoped for, it has given him fame.
Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest child of Eli Whitney Sr., a prosperous farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Fay of Westborough.
Whitney's mother had died in 1777, when he was eleven.
At age fourteen, he had operated a profitable nail manufacturing operation in his father's workshop during the Revolutionary War.
Because his stepmother opposed his wish to attend college, Whitney had worked as a farm laborer and schoolteacher to save money.
He prepared for Yale at Leicester Academy (now Becker College) and under the tutelage of Rev.
Elizur Goodrich of Durham, Connecticut, he had entered the Class of 1789, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792.
Whitney had expected to study law but, finding himself short of funds, accepted an offer to go to South Carolina as a private tutor.
Instead of reaching his destination, however, he had been convinced to visit Georgia, which in the closing years of the eighteenth century is a magnet for New Englanders seeking their fortunes (its Revolutionary-era governor had been Lyman Hall, a migrant from Connecticut).
When he initially sailed for South Carolina, among his shipmates were the widow and family of Revolutionary hero, Gen. Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island.
Mrs. Greene had invited Whitney to visit her Georgia plantation, Mulberry Grove.
Her plantation manager and husband-to-be is Phineas Miller, another Connecticut migrant and Yale graduate (Class of 1785), who will become Whitney's business partner.
