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Eli Whitney Essay, Research Paper

By 1790 slavery was on the decline in America. Apart from tobacco, rice, and a special strain of cotton that could be grown only in very few places, the South really had no money crop to export. Tobacco was a land waster, depleting the soil within very few years. Land was so cheap that tobacco planters never bothered to reclaim the soil by crop rotation — they simply found new land farther west. The other crops — rice, indigo, corn, and some wheat — made for no great wealth. Slaves cost something, not only to buy but to maintain, and some Southern planters thought that conditions had reached a point where a slave’s labor no longer paid for his care. Eli Whitney came to the south in 1793, conveniently enough, during the time when Southern planters were in their most desperate days. In a little over a week, he started the biggest avalanche of production that any economy had ever experienced. The South would never be the same again.

Eli Whitney was born on December 8, 1765 in Westboro, Massachusetts. The tall, heavy-shouldered boy worked as a blacksmith. He had an almost natural understanding of mechanisms. On a machine made at home, he made nails, and at one time he was the only maker of ladies’ hatpins in the country.

In his early twenties, Whitney became determined to attend Yale College. Since Yale was mostly a school for law or theology, his parents objected. How could Yale College help enhance his mechanical talents? Finally, at the age of twenty-three, Whitney became a student at Yale. By this time, he seemed almost middle-aged to his classmates. After he graduated with his degree in 1792, he found that no jobs were available to a man with his talents. He eventually settled for teaching, and accepted a job as a tutor in South Carolina, his salary was promised to be one hundred guineas a year.

He sailed on a small coasting packet with only a few passengers, among whom was the widow of the Revolutionary general, Nathanael Greene. The Greenes had settled in Savannah after the war. When Whitney arrived in South Carolina, he found that the promised salary was going to be halved. He not only refused to take the position, but decided to give up teaching all together. Coming to his aid, Mrs. Greene invited him to her plantation where he could read law, and also help out the plantation manager, Phineas Miller. Miller, a few years older than Whitney, was a Yale alumnus and the fiancee of Mrs. Greene. Whitney accepted the offer.

Over time Whitney got settled in, and one day while neighbors were visiting the plantation, their conversation fell to discussing the bad times. There was no money crop whatsoever; the only variety of cotton that would grow in that region was the practically useless green seed variety. Ten hours of manual work was needed to separate one point of lint from three pounds of the small tough seeds. Until some kind of machine could be built to do the work, the green seed cotton was little better than a weed.

Overhearing their conversation, Mrs. Greene jumped in, “Gentlemen, apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney. He can make anything.”

Phineas Miller and Mrs. Green urged Whitney to study the process in which the cotton was cleaned, and see if he could create some sort of machine to do this work faster and more efficiently. Whitney found that the process was actually pretty simplistic; one hand held the seed while the other hand sorted out the small strands of lint.

Whitney tried to make a machine that almost mirrored this process. To take the place of a hand holding the seed, he made a sort of sieve of wires stretched lengthwise. It took longer to make the wire than it did to string it; the proper kind of wire was nonexistent. To do the work of the fingers which pulled out the lint, Whitney had a drum rotate past the sieve almost touching it. On the surface of the drum there were small, hook-shaped wires projecting out that caught the lint from the seed. The wires on the sieve held the seeds back while the lint was pulled away. A brush, which rotated four times as fast as the drum, cleaned off the lint from the hooks. That was all there was to Whitney’s cotton gin. It never became more complicated than that.

A demonstration of his first model was given to a few friends. In one hour, he produced what would normally be a full day’s work for several workers. With no more than the promise that Whitney would patent the machine and make a few more, the men who had witnessed the demonstration immediately ordered whole fields to be planted with green seed cotton. Word got around the district so rapidly that Whitney’s workshop was broken open and his machine examined. Within a few weeks, more cotton was planted than Whitney could possible have ginned in a year of making new machines.

Before Whitney had a chance to complete his patented model, the prematurely planted cotton came to growth. With a harvest pressing on them, planters had no time to wait for the legal fine points to be sorted out. The cotton gin was pirated in a heart-beat.

Whitney went into partnership with Miller. Whitney was to go north to New Haven, secure his patent, and begin manufacturing machines, while Miller was to remain in the South and see that the machines were placed. The partners’ first plan was that no machine was to be sold, but installed for a percentage of the profit earned. Since they had no idea that cotton planting would take place in such mass proportions, they did not know that they were asking for an agreement that would earn them millions of dollars a year. Miller’s idea was to take one pound of every three of cotton, but the planters didn’t want to comply.

By the time Whitney and Miller were willing to settle for outright sale or even a small royalty on every machine made by someone else, the amount of money due to them was

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