Inventors: Eli Whitney

1765–1825, American inventor of the cotton gin, b. Westboro, Mass., grad. Yale, 1792. When he was staying as tutor at Mulberry Grove, the plantation of Mrs. Nathanael Greene, Whitney was encouraged by Mrs. Greene and visiting cotton planters to try to find some device by which the fiber of short-staple cotton could be rapidly separated from the seed. Whitney, whose creative mechanical bent had been evident from boyhood, completed his model gin early in 1793, after about 10 days of work, and by April had built an improved one. With Phineas Miller, Mrs. Greene's plantation manager (and later her husband), he formed a partnership to manufacture gins at New Haven. He was unable to make enough gins to meet the demand, and although the partners received a patent in 1794, others copied his model and soon many gins were in use. After much litigation the partners received (1807) a favorable decision to protect their patent, but Congress in 1812 denied Whitney's petition for its renewal. His invention, which had immense economic and social effects, brought great wealth to many others, but little to Whitney himself. In 1798 he built a firearms factory near New Haven. The muskets his workmen made by methods comparable to those of modern mass industrial production were the first to have standardized, interchangeable parts.

Shift your attention from Britain to the United States, where a class of mobile and educated entrepreneurs stood poised to build an industrial economy. This episode introduces you to the world of American manufacturing. Learn about Francis Cabot Lowell and Eli Whitney, early innovators in the US textile industry.

In this video, we'll explain the story of the infamous, cotton gin - an 18th century invention used by African-American slaves that changed the United States for the better and the worse.

Eli Whitney's America was a nation just recently emerging from its colonial status, and "Yankee ingenuity" would prove essential for it to move from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Whitney was still in college when America's first census, in 1790, showed a total population of 3,231, 533, with over 90 percent of these people engaged in agriculture. The largest city was New York, with a population of 33,131; next came Philadelphia, with 28,522 persons, and then Boston, with a population of 18,300. Together, the three largest U.S. cities had a population that could comfortably be seated in a modern football stadium. Born December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts, Eli Whitney Jr. was the eldest of Eli and Elizabeth Whitney's four children. Eli's father had a small workshop on their farm, containing basic tools and a lathe for turning chair legs and the younger Whitney learned how to use these tools. He made and repaired violins and demonstrated his entrepreneurial tendencies early. During the Revolutionary War, he discovered that nails brought a high price and talked his father into letting him use the workshop to make nails for resale. After the war, when nails were no longer in such great demand, he noticed that women had started using long pins to keep their hats on their heads and changed his product line to make hat pins. He aspired to a higher education, but limited family finances delayed his entry into Yale College until 1789, when he was twenty-four years old. His father pledged $1,000 for the four years at Yale, but Eli had to make up the balance of some $600 by tutoring others. At the time, Yale's curriculum provided a classical education, designed to create gentlemen for politics, the ministry, or law, but Eli was not drawn to any of these fields. Unemployed upon graduation in 1792, he was able to gain a tutor's position in the South and traveled to Savannah, Georgia, with another Yale alumnus, Phineas Miller.