“With regard to the utility of this discovery the court would deem it a waste of time to dwell long upon this topic. Is there a man who hears us who has not experienced its utility? The whole interior of the Southern states was languishing and its inhabitants emigrating for want of some object to engage their attention and employ their industry, when the invention of this machine at once opened views to them which set the whole country in active motion. From childhood to age it has presented to us a lucrative employment. Our debts have been paid off, our capitals have increased, and our lands trebled themselves in value. We cannot express the weight of the obligation which the country owes to this invention. The extent of it cannot now be seen. Some faint presentiment may be formed from the reflection that cotton is rapidly supplanting wool, flax, silk, and even furs in manufactures, and may one day profitably supply the use of specie in our East India trade. Our sister states also participate in the benefits of this invention, for besides affording the raw material for their manufacturers, the bulkiness and quantity of the article afford a valuable employment for their shipping.”
Whitney had fought long and hard, and had at last received at least partial justice. But it had been so slow in coming that, when his rights were to a certain extent established, there were only a few years left his patents to run. He had realized for some time that he must look elsewhere for financial returns, and so, in 1798, had begun the manufacture of firearms. He purchased a site for his factory near New Haven, at a place called Whitneyville now, then known as East Rock. Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, ordered 10,000 stand of arms from him, and he contracted to furnish them. At first he met with many difficulties, owing to lack of proper materials and workmen, and his own lack of familiarity with the business. But as time went on the works improved, and Whitney applied his inventive genius to many important improvements. He received other contracts, and eventually the national government came to rely upon his factory for a large part of its war supplies.
In 1812 Whitney applied for a renewal of his patent for the cotton-gin. He set forth the facts that he had received almost no compensation for his invention, that it had made the fortune of many of the Southern states, that it enabled one man to do the work of a thousand men before, but that, placing the value of one man’s labor at twenty cents a day, the whole amount he had received was less than the value of the labor saved in one hour by the use of his machines throughout the country. But again there was opposition from many influential Southern planters, and his application was denied.
The inventor was, however, making money from his factory for firearms, and his personal fortunes had brightened. In 1817 he married Henrietta Edwards, the daughter of Judge Pierpont Edwards, of Connecticut. His home life was ideally happy, he was fond of New Haven, and eventually he received increasing evidence that the people of the cotton lands were learning their indebtedness to him, and were anxious to make some restitution for their earlier disregard of his claims. He died January 8, 1825.
The material value of Eli Whitney’s invention can hardly be estimated. It opened a new kingdom to the South. It built up countless acres of hitherto unprofitable land. But in spite of men’s recognition of the value of his cotton-gin, and their instant adoption of it everywhere, he was for years denied his title to it, and had to wage a warfare that is almost without parallel in the history of American inventors.
VII
FULTON AND THE STEAMBOAT
1765-1815
There is a peculiar charm attaching to the figure of Robert Fulton, the attraction that plays about the man who is many-sided, and picturesque on whatever side one looks at him. He was a man at home on both shores of the Atlantic, at a time when such men were rare. He had been taught drawing by Major André, when the latter was a prisoner of war in the little Pennsylvania town of Lancaster. He had hung out his sign as Painter of Miniatures at the corner of Second and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia, under the friendly patronage of Benjamin Franklin. He had lodged in London at the house of Benjamin West, and shown his pictures at the Royal Academy. Two great English noblemen became his allies in scientific studies. Napoleon, as First Consul, bargained with him over his invention of torpedoes. Finally he sent the little Clermont up the Hudson under steam. There was a man of rare ability, one who had many hostages to give to fortune. He was the artist turned inventor, as many another has done, and if he was not as great an artist as Leonardo da Vinci neither was Leonardo as great an inventor as Robert Fulton.
Fulton invented a machine for cutting marble, one for spinning flax, a double inclined plane for canal navigation, a machine for twisting rope, an earth-scoop for canal and irrigation purposes, a cable-cutter, the earliest French panorama, a submarine torpedo boat, and the steamboat. Other men had worked over steamboats, but he reached the goal. He made the steamboat practicable, as Watt had the steam-engine. Above all, he was very fortunate; he found his countrymen ready to welcome the Clermont, and to fall in with his plans, an attitude which had not faced certain men in England and in France who had built similar boats earlier than Fulton. Some engineers have been tempted to call him a lucky amateur, a talented artist who happened to become interested in new methods of navigation. If one grants all this there is still the fact that it was the Clermont’s success that opened the watercourses of the world to steam.