ELI WHITNEY (1765-1825)

Book: The Beginner's American History

Chapter: XX | Eli Whitney

Author: D. H. Montgomery

The name cut on a door.

Near Westboro', Massachusetts, there is an old farm-house which was built before the war of the Revolution. Close to the house is a small wooden building; on the door you can read a boy's name, just as he cut it with his pocket-knife more than a hundred years ago*.

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Here is the door with the name. If the boy had added the date of his birth, he would have cut the figures 1765; but perhaps, just as he got to that point, his father appeared and said rather sharply: Eli, don't be cutting that door. No, sir, said Eli, with a start; and shutting his knife up with a snap, he hurried off to get the cows or to do his chores*.

*The house is no longer standing, and the door has disappeared.

* Chores: getting in wood, feeding cattle, etc.

What Eli Whitney used to do in his father's little workshop; the fiddle.

Eli Whitney's father used that little wooden building as a kind of workshop, where he mended chairs and did many other small jobs. Eli liked to go to that workshop and make little things for himself, such as water-wheels and windmills; for it was as natural for him to use tools as it was to whistle.

Once when Eli's father was gone from home for several days, the boy was very busy all the while in the little shop. When Mr. Whitney came back he asked his housekeeper, "What has Eli been doing?" "Oh," she replied, "he has been making a fiddle." His father shook his head, and said that he was afraid Eli would never get on much in the world. But Eli's fiddle, though it was rough-looking, was well made. It had music in it, and the neighbors liked to hear it: somehow it seemed to say through all the tunes played on it, "Whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well."

Eli Whitney begins making nails; he goes to college.

When Eli was fifteen, he began making nails. We have machines to-day which will make more than a hundred nails a minute; but Eli made his, one by one, by pounding them out of a long, slender bar of red-hot iron. Whitney's hand-made nails were not handsome, but they were strong and tough, and as the Revolutionary War was then going on, he could sell all he could make.

After the war was over the demand for nails was not so good. Then Whitney threw down his hammer, and said, "I am going to college." He had no money; but he worked his way through Yale College, partly by teaching and partly by doing little jobs with his tools. A carpenter who saw him at work one day, noticed how neatly and skilfully he used his tools, and said, "There was one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college."

Whitney goes to Georgia; he stops with Mrs. General Greene; the embroidery frame.

When the young man had completed his course of study he went to Georgia to teach in a gentleman's family. On the way to Savannah he became acquainted with Mrs. Greene, the widow of the famous General Greene of Rhode Island. General Greene had done such excellent fighting in the south during the Revolution that, after the war was over, the state of Georgia gave him a large piece of land near Savannah.

Mrs. Greene invited young Whitney to her house; as he had been disappointed in getting the place to teach, he was very glad to accept her kind invitation. While he was there he made her an embroidery frame. It was much better than the old one that she had been using, and she thought the maker of it was wonderfully skilful.

A talk about raising cotton, and about cotton seeds.

Not long after this, a number of cotton-planters were at Mrs. Greene's house. In speaking about raising cotton they said that the man who could invent a machine for stripping off the cotton seeds from the plant would make his fortune.

For what is called raw cotton or cotton wool, as it grows in the field, has a great number of little green seeds clinging to it. Before the cotton wool can be spun into thread and woven into cloth, those seeds must be pulled off.

At that time the planters set the negroes to do this. When they had finished their day's labor of gathering the cotton in the cotton field, the men, women, and children would sit down and pick off the seeds, which stick so tight that getting them off is no easy task.

After the planters had talked awhile about this work, Mrs. Greene said, "If you want a machine to do it, you should apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney; he can make anything." "But," said Mr. Whitney, "I have never seen a cotton plant or a cotton seed in my life"; for it was not the time of year then to see it growing in the fields.

Whitney gets some cotton wool; he invents the cotton-gin; what that machine did.

After the planters had gone, Eli Whitney went to Savannah and hunted about until he found, in some store or warehouse, a little cotton wool with the seeds left on it. He took this back with him and set to work to make a machine which would strip off the seeds.

He said to himself, If I fasten some upright pieces of wire in a board, and have the wires set very close together, like the teeth of a comb, and then pull the cotton wool through the wires with my fingers, the seeds, being too large to come through, will be torn off and left behind. He tried it, and found that the cotton wool came through without any seeds on it. Now, said he, if I should make a wheel, and cover it with short steel teeth, shaped like hooks, those teeth would pull the cotton wool through the wires better than my fingers do, and very much faster.

He made such a wheel; it was turned by a crank; it did the work perfectly; so, in the year 1793, he had invented the machine the planters wanted.

Before that time it used to take one negro all day to clean a single pound of cotton of its seeds by picking them off one by one; now, Eli Whitney's cotton-gin*, as he called his machine, would clean a thousand pounds in a day.

*Gin: a shortened form of the word engine, meaning any kind of a machine.

Price of common cotton cloth to-day; what makes it so cheap; "King Cotton."

To-day nothing is much cheaper than common cotton cloth. You can buy it for ten or twelve cents a yard, but before Whitney invented his cotton-gin it sold for a dollar and a half a yard. A hundred years ago the planters at the south raised very little cotton, for few people could afford to wear it; but after this wonderful machine was made, the planters kept making their fields bigger and bigger. At last they raised so much more of this plant than of anything else, that they said, "Cotton is king." It was Eli Whitney who built the throne for that king; and although he did not make a fortune by his machine, yet he received a good deal of money for the use of it in some of the southern states.

Later, Mr. Whitney built a gun-factory near New Haven, Connecticut, at a place now called Whitneyville; at that factory he made thousands of the muskets which we used in our second war with England in 1812*.

*In the war of 1812 the British war-ships attacked Fort McHenry, one of the defences of Baltimore. Francis Scott Key, a native of Maryland, who was then detained on board a British man-of-war, anxiously watched the battle during the night; before dawn the firing ceased. Key had no means of telling whether the British had taken the fort until the sun rose; then, to his joy, he saw the American flag still floating triumphantly above the fort—that meant that the British had failed in their attack, and Key, in his delight, hastily wrote the song of the Star Spangled Banner on the back of a letter which he had in his pocket. The song was at once printed, and in a few weeks it was known and sung from one end of the United States to the other.

Summary.

About a hundred years ago (1793), Eli Whitney of Westboro', Massachusetts, invented the cotton-gin, a machine for pulling off the green seeds from cotton wool, so that it may be easily woven into cloth. That machine made thousands of cotton-planters and cotton manufacturers rich, and by it cotton cloth became so cheap that everybody could afford to use it.