Born in 1765, Eli Whitney grew up on a farm in Westborough, Massachusetts and proved to have many skills in mechanics at a very young age. He moved to Georgia after he graduated from Yale where he used his intellectual skills and worked as a tutor. There, he learned that the cotton industry was lacking production efficiency because picking the seeds out of the cotton was slow and took too much time to acomplish. By utilizing his mechanical skills, he decided to invent a machine to do the job faster. After ten days of work, Whitney created a model of his gin in September of 1793 that could be operated by one man and could do the labor of fifty. He patented his innovation in 1794, and with the aide of a partner's finances, he began manufacuting immediately. Although his creation made cotton easier to produce, Whitney did not profit from his gin because at the same time, others were making similar gins by copying his simple model. His competition was great, and even after going to court to keep his patent, he still did not get the profits that he deserved. The cotton gin is an innovation that revolutionized the cotton industry, and its technology helped shape the economy of our country.
--Jenny Henzi, Noble and Greenough School, Class of 2000
--History Teacher: Don Allard
--Source: The Reader's Companion to American History
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