"That boat move? So will a log move if set adrift," said the people who thought themselves very wise. "It will move when the tide moves it, and not before." But none of them felt like laughing when they saw the wheels begin to turn and the boat to glide out into the stream, moving against the tide.
"She moves! she moves!" cried the crowd, and nobody said a word about "Fulton's Folly."
Move she did. Up the Hudson she went against wind and current, and reached Albany, one hundred and forty-two miles away, in thirty-two hours. This was at the rate of four and a half miles an hour. It was not many years before steamboats were running on all our rivers.
That is all I shall say here about the steamboat, for there is another story of invention I wish to tell you before I close. This is about the cotton fibre, which you know is the great product of the Southern States.
The cotton plant when ripe has a white, fluffy head, and a great bunch of snow-white fibres, within which are the seeds. In old times these had to be taken out by hand, and it was a whole day's work for a negro to get the seeds out of a pound of the cotton. This made cotton so dear that not much of it could be sold. In 1784 eight bags of it were sent to Liverpool, and the custom-house people there seized it for duties. They said it must have been smuggled from some other country, for the United States could not have produced such a "prodigious quantity."
A few years afterwards a young man named Eli Whitney went South to teach in a private family, but before he got there some one else had his situation, and he was left with nothing to do. Mrs. Greene, the widow of General Greene, who fought so well in the Revolution, took pity on him and gave him a home in her house. He paid her by fixing up things about her house. She found him so handy that she asked him if he could not invent a machine to take the seeds out of the cotton. Whitney said he would try, and he set himself to work. It was not long before he had a machine made which did the work wonderfully well. This machine is known as the "cotton-gin," or cotton engine, for gin is short for engine. On one side of it are wires so close together that the seeds cannot get through. Between them are circular saws which catch the cotton and draw it through, while the seeds pass on.
The machine was a simple one, but it acted like magic. A hundred negroes could not clean as much cotton in a day as one machine. The price of cotton soon went down and a demand for it sprang up. In 1795, when the cotton gin was made, only about 500,000 pounds of cotton were produced in this country. By 1801 this had grown to 20,000,000 pounds. Now it has grown to more than 12,000,000 bales, of nearly 500 pounds each. This is sold to foreign countries and is worked in our own mills at home, being made into millions of yards of cloth of many kinds to clothe the people of the earth. All this comes from the work of Eli Whitney's machine. And the seed taken from the cotton is pressed for the oil it contains, so that from a year's crop we get nearly 150,000,000 gallons of useful oil.