Eli Whitney was born in Westboro, Massachusetts on December 8, 1765 and is best known for inventing the cotton gin (“Eli Whitney”, n.d.). Upon graduating from Yale College in 1792, Whitney intended to study law but instead traveled south and ended up on the farm of Mrs. Catherine Greene near Savannah, Georgia (“Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney”, 2010). While staying on Mrs. Greene’s farm, Eli Whitney learned about the difficulty that farmers had cleaning green-seed cotton. To thoroughly clean green-seed cotton, excessive manual labor was required. A slave would spend a full day cleaning only one pound of cotton.
Eli Whitney decided to use his time on Mrs. Greene’s farm to build a device that would increase the speed at which cotton could be cleaned as well as decrease the amount of manual labor required. Quickly, Whitney invented a machine that would clean 50 pounds of cotton in one day (“Eli Whitney”, n.d.). “The invention, called the cotton gin (“gin” was derived from “engine”), worked something like a strainer or sieve: Cotton was run through a wooden drum embedded with a series of hooks that caught the fibers and dragged them through a mesh. The mesh was too fine to let the seeds through but the hooks pulled the cotton fibers through with ease” (“Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney”, 2010). …show more content…
Catherine Greene, formed a partnership to produce the cotton gins and sought a patent on the machine in 1794 (“Eli Whitney Biography”, n.d.). However, the success stories of the cotton gin spread wide and fast, resulting in numerous pirated versions of the cotton gin being built and installed all around the south. This presented a large problem for Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller as they sought to produce the gin and receive exponential profits from the farmers. Whitney filed many lawsuits for infringement but did not find encounter the success that he hoped for (“Eli Whitney”,
Eli Whitney decided to use his time on Mrs. Greene’s farm to build a device that would increase the speed at which cotton could be cleaned as well as decrease the amount of manual labor required. Quickly, Whitney invented a machine that would clean 50 pounds of cotton in one day (“Eli Whitney”, n.d.). “The invention, called the cotton gin (“gin” was derived from “engine”), worked something like a strainer or sieve: Cotton was run through a wooden drum embedded with a series of hooks that caught the fibers and dragged them through a mesh. The mesh was too fine to let the seeds through but the hooks pulled the cotton fibers through with ease” (“Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney”, 2010). …show more content…
Catherine Greene, formed a partnership to produce the cotton gins and sought a patent on the machine in 1794 (“Eli Whitney Biography”, n.d.). However, the success stories of the cotton gin spread wide and fast, resulting in numerous pirated versions of the cotton gin being built and installed all around the south. This presented a large problem for Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller as they sought to produce the gin and receive exponential profits from the farmers. Whitney filed many lawsuits for infringement but did not find encounter the success that he hoped for (“Eli Whitney”,