Whitney, Eli

Eli (1765-1825), an American inventor. He was born at New Haven. He earned his own way through Yale, partly by teaching and partly by working at the trade of carpentering. After graduation in 1792 he went to Georgia to teach. Here he became an inmate of the family of the widow of General Nathaniel Greene of Revolutionary fame. While residing on her estate and reading law he became interested in the problem of extracting the seed from the ripened cotton. The utmost that a slave could do in a day was to pick the fiber free from five or six pounds of cotton. Whitney invented a rotating saw gin by which a single hand, with the assistance of a horse to pull the sweep, could twitch the fiber of 300 pounds through a wire screen and leave the seeds behind. He obtained a patent in 1794, but, through carelessness in exposing his model, other parties already had machines in use or on the market. The state of Carolina voted him $50,000 in recognition of his services. This sum and all he made out of the gin he spent vainly in lawsuits to protect his rights from infringement. All told, he gained fame but no money from the cotton gin. In 1798 he was awarded a government contract for the manufacture of firearms. He settled down at Whitneyville, Connecticut, and made a fortune in this business. He invented no end of ingenious labor-saving machinery. He is said to have been the first manufacturer to adopt the plan of division of labor. He kept each mechanic at work making a single part of the guns. See Cotton