THE COTTON GIN.
Mrs. Greene came to the rescue. Her housewifely instincts saw the difficulty at once and the remedy as well. "Here's what you want!" she exclaimed. She took a clothes brush hanging near by and held it firmly against the teeth of the saws. The cylinder began again to revolve, for the saws were quickly cleaned of the lint, which no longer clogged the teeth. "Madam," said the grateful Whitney, "you have perfected my invention."
The inventor added a second, larger cylinder, near the first. On this he placed a set of stiff brushes. As the two cylinders revolved, the brushes freed the saw teeth from the cotton and left it in the receiving pan.
Thus the cotton gin was invented by the Yankee schoolmaster, Eli Whitney. Though improved in its workmanship and construction, it is still in use wherever cotton is raised. One man with a Whitney cotton gin can clean a thousand pounds of cotton in place of the five pounds formerly cleaned by hand.
When a safety lamp was needed, Davy invented it. When faster water travel was demanded, Fulton constructed the steamboat. When the world needed vast wheat fields, McCormick devised his reaper. When the time had come for the telegraph, Morse studied it out. In the fullness of time, Bell, Edison, and others invented the telephone. When a cotton gin was needed, Eli Whitney made it. Here again the law holds that "necessity is the mother of invention."
When a great invention is made, everybody wants the benefit of it, and people seem to think that the inventor "has no rights which they are bound to respect." Whitney secured a patent upon his machine, but, unmindful of that, a great many persons began to make cotton gins. He was immediately involved in numerous legal contests. Before he secured a single verdict in his favor he had sixty lawsuits pending. After many delays he finally secured the payment of $50,000 which the Legislature of South Carolina had voted him. North Carolina allowed him a percentage on all cotton gins used in that State for five years. Tennessee promised to do the same, but did not keep her promise.
Mr. Whitney struggled along, year after year, until he was convinced that he should never receive a just return for his invention. Seeing no way to gain a competence from the cotton gin he determined to continue the contest no longer, removed to New Haven and turned his attention to the making of firearms. Here he eventually gained a fortune. He made such improvements in the manufacture of firearms as to lay his country under permanent obligation to him for greatly increasing the means of national defense.
Robert Fulton once said: "Arkwright, Watt, and Whitney were the three men that did the most for mankind of any of their contemporaries." Macaulay said: "What Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin has more than equaled in its relation to the power and progress of the United States."