CHAPTER II.
THE COTTON GIN.
In the quiet times that followed the French and Indian War, two years after the Treaty of 1763, Eli Whitney was born in Worcester County in Massachusetts. During the Revolutionary War he was busy making nails by hand, the only way in which nails were made in those days. He earned money enough by this industry and by teaching school to pay his way through college. But it was a slow process, and he was nearly twenty-seven years of age when he was graduated at Yale. Immediately upon his graduation he went to Georgia,—a long distance from home in those days,—having made an engagement to become a private tutor in a wealthy family of that State. On his arrival he found that the man who had engaged his services, unmindful of the contract, had filled the position with another tutor.
The widow of the famous Gen. Nathaniel Greene had a beautiful home at Mulberry Grove, on the Savannah River. Mrs. Greene invited young Whitney to make her house his home while he studied law. She soon perceived that he had great inventive genius. He devised several articles of convenience which Mrs. Greene much appreciated.
At that time the entire cotton crop of this country might have been produced upon a single field of two hundred acres. Cotton then commanded a very high price, because of the labor of separating the cotton fibre from the seed. The cotton clung to the seed with such tenacity that one man could separate the seed from only four or five pounds of cotton in a day. At that rate it would take him three months to make up a bale of clear cotton. Already inventions in machinery for the making of cotton cloth had made the production of cotton a necessity. Some means must be provided for a more rapid separation of cotton from the seed in order to make manufacturing profitable.
A COTTON FIELD.