Eli Whitney biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Eli Whitney was born on December 8, 1765, in Westboro, Massachusetts. He grew up on a farm, yet had an affinity for machine work and technology. As a youth during the Revolutionary War, he became an expert at making nails from a device of his own invention. He later crafted canes and ladies’ hatpins, recognizing opportunity when it arose.

Creation of Cotton Gin

In 1789, Whitney started to attend Yale College and graduated in 1792, with some deliberation about becoming a lawyer. Upon graduation, Whitney was hired to be a tutor in South Carolina. On his way to his new position via boat, he met Catherine Greene, the widow of a Revolutionary War general. Once Whitney found out that his agreed-upon tutoring salary was to be halved, he refused the job and instead accepted Greene’s offer to read law at her Mulberry Grove plantation. There he met Phineas Miller, another Yale alum, who was Greene’s fiancé and manager of her estate.

Greene soon learned of the lack of a money crop in the immediate area, with the market for tobacco declining. Though green-seed cotton was widely available, it took hours of manual labor to properly clean the seed and extract the fiber. With Greene’s support, Whitney worked through the winter to devise a machine that was able to quickly and efficiently clean the cotton using a system of hooks, wires and a rotating brush.

When Whitney demonstrated his new cotton gin (“gin” being short for engine) to some colleagues—with the device producing more cotton in an hour than what could be produced by multiple workers in a day—the reaction was immediate. Local planters took to the widespread planting of green-seed cotton, immediately straining existing modes of production.

Pirated Patent and Slavery

Whitney and Miller patented the gin in 1794, with the aim of producing and installing gins throughout the South and charging farmers two-fifths of resulting profits. Their device was widely pirated, however, with farmers creating their own version of the gin. Whitney spent years in legal battles and by the turn of the century agreed to license gins at an affordable rate. Southern planters were ultimately able to reap huge financial windfalls from the invention while Whitney made almost no net profit, even after he was able to receive monetary settlements from various states.

By the mid-1800s, Southern cotton production had risen by a stratospheric amount from the previous century, with more than a million bales of cotton being produced by 1840. With people needed to harvest the crop, greed fueled an industry-stifling and dehumanizing slaveholding culture, with around a third of the U.S. Southern population enslaved by 1860.