Eli Whitney Invents the Cotton Gin. After his conversation with the Georgia planters, Eli Whitney...
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Transcript of Eli Whitney Invents the Cotton Gin. After his conversation with the Georgia planters, Eli Whitney...
![Page 1: Eli Whitney Invents the Cotton Gin. After his conversation with the Georgia planters, Eli Whitney put aside his plans to study law and instead tinkered.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022062315/5697c0031a28abf838cc3faa/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Eli Whitney Invents the Cotton Gin
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After his conversation with the Georgia planters, Eli Whitney put aside his plans to study law and instead tinkered throughout the winter and spring in a secret workshop provided by Catherine Greene.
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Before long he had arrived at his basic design, which had a cylinder spiked with wire teeth. The raw cotton was fed onto the cylinder and as it rotated the teeth passed through narrow slits in a piece of wood, pulling the cotton fibers through but leaving the seeds behind.
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Within months he had created the cotton gin. A small gin could be hand-cranked; larger versions could be harnessed to a horse or driven by water power.
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"One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines," wrote Whitney to his father. . . . "Tis generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a fortune by it."
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But in the end, Whitney made virtually nothing from his invention. Others copied his invention and he was left virtually penniless.
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Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts
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In 1804, Whitney left the South forever, disappointed and disgusted. In his words, "An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor."
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But after settling in New Haven, Connecticut, Whitney settled on an idea that would be as valuable to the North as his cotton gin was to the South.
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In 1798, the federal government awarded Eli Whitney a contract of $134,000 to produce and deliver 10,000 muskets.
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Until then, every rifle had been made by hand from stock to barrel; but the parts of one gun did not fit any other gun, nor did anyone expect them to.
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It was Whitney's idea to use machines that would make all the parts of his rifles so nearly identical that the machines parts could be interchangeable from one gun to another.
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This system of manufacturing would permit an unskilled man to turn out a product that would be just as good as one made by a highly trained machinist.
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Whitney’s idea caught on all over America.
By 1850, English visitors back from America described what they now called the “American System of Manufacture.”