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INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS
Eli Whitney
THE COTTON GIN

The first patent of major importance to be issued by the U.S. government after it was formed was Eli Whitney’s patent for the cotton gin (“gin” is short for “engine”), which was issued on March 14, 1794. The patent description is in longhand, for reasons I cannot explain.

Upon graduating Yale as an engineer in 1792, Whitney, like many college graduates of today, found himself in debt and in need of a job. He left his home in Massachusetts and took a job as a teacher in South Carolina. That job fell through, and Katherine Greene, the war widow of General Nathanial Greene, invited Whitney to stay at her Georgia cotton plantation in early 1793. He noticed that long‐staple cotton, which was readily separated from its seed, could only be grown along the coast. The inland‐grown variety of cotton had sticky green seeds that were difficult to cull from the fluffy white cotton bolls, and thus was less profitable to grow and harvest. It took 10 hours of hand labor to sift out a single point of cotton lint from its seeds.

Whitney, after observing the manual process being used for separating the sticky seeds from the cotton bolls, built his first machine, which did not work. The bulk cotton was pushed against a wire mesh screen, which held back the seeds while wooden teeth extending from a rotating drum pulled the cotton fibers through the mesh screen. However, this machine jammed. His next version incorporated thin wire hooks to replace the wooden teeth, and the collected fibers were cleared away by a moving brush. This second machine was successful.

According to some accounts, a question remains to this day whether Whitney or his employer, Mrs. Greene, was the “inventor” of the key element of the successful cotton gin—the wire hooks. Some say the plantation foreman suggested to Greene that the wooden teeth be replaced by wires, and that Greene then told Whitney. Whitney’s supporters, on the other hand, cite a letter to the editor of Southern Agriculturist magazine, admittedly based on shaky sources, that Whitney specifically asked Mrs. Greene for a pin to use at the start of his experimentation. A factor tending to swing the pendulum toward Whitney was that, before he left Massachusetts, he was the new country’s only hatpin manufacturer.

In 1794, Whitney filed a patent application for his (or Greene’s) cotton gin. He also gave a demonstration of his model to a few friends, producing in 1 hour a full day’s output of several workers. The witnesses to this demonstration immediately had whole fields planted in green seed cotton. Word spread, and the farmers grew excited and impatient. Whitney’s shop was broken into, and examinations made of his new cotton gin. Then, more fields were planted with cotton.

Before Whitney had a chance to prepare a patent model of his invention (required in those days), or to secure patent protection, the cotton crops were ready for harvest, and the planters did not have time to work within ethical or legal parameters. Whitney’s cotton gin was simply pirated. Whitney and his partner, Phineas Miller, decided to build cotton gins and lease, not sell, them to the planters in exchange for 1 pound of every 3 pounds of cotton put through their machines. The planters revolted at this arrangement, as a virtual flood of white cotton was erupting from the Southern soil.

The partners, heavily in debt, were forced to approach the Southern courts to enforce their patent rights, which resulted in disaster. In 1801, they opted for grants from several Southern states, and, in return, the cotton gin would become public property. One state, South Carolina, accepted, offered $50,000, made a down payment of $20,000, and never paid the remainder. Eventually, Whitney and Miller received about $90,000 from the states, which was used up immediately to pay legal costs and other expenses. In 1803, the states repudiated their agreements, and sued Whitney for the return of the money paid previously. In 1804, Whitney petitioned the U.S. Congress for relief, and by one vote avoided financial ruin. At that point, he felt the past 10 years were wasted. Whitney became discouraged with cotton, and left the South forever.

Upon returning to New Haven, Connecticut, he started manufacturing goods and developing mass production techniques and factories. In time, his manufacturing process developments changed the industrial capabilities of the North, just as his cotton gin had changed the face of the South.