Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney built the machine that made short-staple cotton profitable and so made slavery, which had been dying in the 1790s, the foundation of the American South for another seventy years; he then made almost no money from it and turned to muskets. He was born in 1765 in Westborough, Massachusetts, the son of a farmer, made nails in his father's shop as a boy, paid his way through Yale by teaching, and graduated in 1792 with no prospects. He went south to tutor and ended up at Mulberry Grove, the Georgia plantation of Catharine Greene, the widow of General Nathanael Greene, where the planters at her table complained that the green-seed cotton that grew inland could not be cleaned by hand fast enough to pay. In a few weeks in the spring of 1793 he made a box with a drum of wire hooks that pulled the fibre through a grate the seeds could not pass. One gin did the work of fifty hands. He patented it in 1794, and since the machine was easy to copy and the planters copied it, he spent the decade in the courts of Georgia losing, and settled in the end for a lump sum from South Carolina. The cotton crop went from about three thousand bales in 1790 to four million by 1860, the Deep South was cleared for it, and the enslaved population grew from seven hundred thousand to four million; the Georgia page names him for that. In 1798 he took a federal contract for ten thousand muskets in two years without a factory or workers, delivered them in ten years, and along the way built a water-powered works at New Haven and argued for making parts to gauges so that any lock would fit any stock. The demonstration he staged for Adams and Jefferson in 1801 was partly rigged, and the real interchangeable parts came from the Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories, but the Connecticut page names him for the idea. He died at New Haven in January 1825 at fifty-nine.
- Lived: 1765 CE – 1825 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: inventor, manufacturer
