Cotton Gin’s Impact on Slavery And The American Economy Instead, the design for the cotton gin was pirated and plantation owners constructed their own machines–many of them an improvement over Whitney’s original model. 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 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. Whitney received a patent for his invention in 1794 he and Miller then formed a cotton gin manufacturing company. 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’s hand-cranked machine could remove the seeds from 50 pounds of cotton in a single day. Smaller gins could be cranked by hand larger ones could be powered by a horse and, later, by a steam engine. The mesh was too fine to let the seeds through but the hooks pulled the cotton fibers through with ease. 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. Greene and her plantation manager, Phineas Miller (1764-1803), 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 average cotton picker could remove the seeds from only about one pound of short-staple cotton per day. 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. A type of cotton known as long staple was easy to clean, but grew well only along coastal areas. But cotton plants contained seeds that were difficult to separate from the soft fibers. 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. Others believe the idea was Whitney's but Greene played an important role as both designer and financier. While there, Whitney learned about cotton production–in particular, the difficulty cotton farmers faced making a living.ĭid you know? Some historians believe Catherine Greene devised the cotton gin and Eli Whitney merely built it and applied for the patent, since at that time women were not allowed to file for patents. He originally planned to work as a private tutor but instead accepted an invitation to stay with Catherine Greene (1755–1814), the widow of American Revolutionary War (1775-83) general Nathanael Greene, on her plantation, known as Mulberry Grove, near Savannah, Georgia. In 1792, after graduating from Yale College (now Yale University), Whitney headed to the South. Among the objects he designed and built as a youth were a nail forge and a violin. Growing up, Whitney, whose father was a farmer, proved to be a talented mechanic and inventor. Eli Whitney was born on December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts.
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