Eli Whitney and the Invention of the Cotton Gin
Eli Whitney was a Massachusetts-born man who was very adept in machinery. Since, at the time, there were no jobs in engineering, in 1793 he accepted a teaching job in South Carolina where he befriended Nathaniel Greene’s widow, Katherine. Eventually, Whitney lost his teaching job and was invited by Greene to live on her plantation of Mulberry Grove. While at Mulberry Grove, Whitney saw the difficulty that farmers were having with the “green seed” cotton, and developed his machine that did the same task in a much easier, faster way. It is said that he created the prototype for the Cotton Gin within just ten days of being at Mulberry Grove (MIT). Whitney himself stated that, “This Gin, if turned with horses or by water, two persons will clean as much cotton in one Day as a Hundred persons could clean in the same time” (Whitney).
Mulberry Grove, where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin
The original prototype involved wooden teeth moving the cotton fibers against wire mesh, removing the seeds, but this jammed often. The final version of the Cotton Gin replaced the wooden teeth with thin wires, like that of a fireplace brush (MIT). In 1794, Whitney received a patent for his invention and set up several cotton gins around the South with partner, Phineas Miller, where the men charged farmers to gin their cotton. Farmers stole Whitney’s design since they felt as though using the gin was an unnecessary tax on them, and, since Whitney’s patent had a loophole which disabled him from winning any suits until 1800, Whitney was rapidly losing money off of his great invention (Schur). The constant violation of his invention led Whitney to say, "An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor" when discussing the Cotton Gin, since he had lost so much from trials and reproductions of his invention (PBS).
A diagram of the cotton gin from Whitney's patent for the cotton gin (Whitney)
A video demonstrating how the gin works (the cotton gin int the video is located at the Smithsonian)