Behring Center. Eli Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, in , the year of the Stamp Act, and grew up during the tumultuous years of the American Revolution. He was the oldest son of a farmer, and those were difficult times for farmers in New England. Making things more challenging for Whitney, he actually had little interest in farming. Leaving the farm behind, Whitney decided that he needed a college education to further his career and worked as a teacher to support his studies in preparation for admission to Yale.
He was 23 years old when Yale admitted him, far older than most students. Yale professors Ezra Stiles and Benjamin Silliman recognized his intelligence and abilities, and Stiles obtained a teaching position for Whitney in South Carolina following his graduation in Whitney hoped to become a lawyer, but money continued to be a problem.
His father paid for his education at Yale, but was unable to provide further support. Whitney never took up his teaching post in South Carolina. While staying with friends in Georgia, he discovered the need for a machine that removed the seeds from the fibers of raw cotton. The burgeoning textile industry in England created a huge demand for cotton, but the difficulty of removing seeds from the fibers made cotton production in the American South unprofitable.
Whitney always had a gift for making things, and in about ten days, he devised a model for a cotton gin that cleaned more than ten times as much cotton as a single man doing the work by hand.
The principles behind the machine were simple and, consequently, cotton growers all over the South soon began making their own or bought them from local manufacturers. Whitney spent years protesting these patent infringements and became entangled in numerous lawsuits. His law studies proved useful in these endless court battles, but he never became a lawyer.
He became, instead, what today is a mechanical engineer, though no such profession existed in the 18th century.
It was his genius to observe what people needed, and to provide it. There he saw how hard it was to separate the green seeds from short-staple cotton. In just a few days in , he invented a machine that could do the task ten times faster than a slave doing the work by hand. The cotton gin revolutionized agriculture. It also made possible the cotton economy of the American South, perpetuating and increasing the practice of slavery upon which the agricultural system depended.
Manufacturing System In , Whitney, who had not seen much profit from his epochal machine, launched a new venture: arms manufacturing. For his work, he is credited as a pioneer of American manufacturing. Eli Whitney was born on December 8, , in Westborough, Massachusetts. Growing up, Whitney, whose father was a farmer, proved to be a talented mechanic and inventor.
Among the objects he designed and built as a youth were a nail forge and a violin. He originally planned to work as a private tutor but instead accepted an invitation to stay with Catherine Greene — , the widow of American Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, on her plantation, known as Mulberry Grove, near Savannah, Georgia.
While there, Whitney learned about cotton production—in particular, the difficulty cotton farmers faced making a living. In many ways, cotton was an ideal crop; it was easily grown, and unlike food crops its fibers could be stored for long periods of time.
But cotton plants contained seeds that were difficult to separate from the soft fibers. A type of cotton known as long staple was easy to clean, but grew well only along coastal areas. The vast majority of cotton farmers were forced to grow the more labor-intensive short-staple cotton, which had to be cleaned painstakingly by hand, one plant at a time. The average cotton picker could remove the seeds from only about one pound of short-staple cotton per day.
Greene and her plantation manager, Phineas Miller , explained the problem with short-staple cotton to Whitney, and soon thereafter he built a machine that could effectively and efficiently remove the seeds from cotton plants. The mesh was too fine to let the seeds through but the hooks pulled the cotton fibers through with ease. Smaller gins could be cranked by hand; larger ones could be powered by a horse and, later, by a steam engine.
Whitney wrote to his father: "One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines…Tis generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by it. Whitney received a patent for his invention in ; he and Miller then formed a cotton gin manufacturing company. The two entrepreneurs planned to build cotton gins and install them on plantations throughout the South, taking as payment a portion of all the cotton produced by each plantation.
While farmers were delighted with the idea of a machine that could boost cotton production so dramatically, they had no intention of sharing a significant percentage of their profits with Whitney and Miller. The patent laws of the time had loopholes that made it difficult for Whitney to protect his rights asan inventor. Still, the cotton gin had transformed the American economy. Although the cotton gin made cotton processing less labor-intensive, it helped planters earn greater profits, prompting them to grow larger crops, which in turn required more people.
Because slavery was the cheapest form of labor, cotton farmers simply acquired more slaves.
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