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Eli Whitney Jr. (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin in 1793, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.
A model of a 19th-century cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, Connecticut. A Cotton Gin—meaning "Cotton engine" [1] [2] —is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. [3]
Eli Whitney Blake Jr. (April 20, 1836 – October 1, 1895) was an American scientist. His father and namesake was an inventor and partner of the Blake Brothers manufacturing firm. The origin of the name Eli Whitney comes from Blake senior's uncle Eli Whitney, who changed the face of the cotton industry with the invention of the cotton gin. [1]
With the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1794, American slaveholders had the means to make cotton production significantly more profitable. The era of King Cotton was underway by the early 1800s to such an extent that by the mid-19th century, southern slave plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton.
Within a year he had produced a model for the cotton gin. [3] In an 1883 article in The North American Review titled "Woman as Inventor", the early feminist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage claimed that Mrs. Greene suggested to Whitney the use of a brush-like component, which was instrumental in separating the seeds from the cotton.
In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and later received a patent on March 14, 1794. [31] Whitney's cotton gin could have possibly ignited a revolution in the cotton industry and the rise of "King Cotton" as the main cash crop in the South. However, it never made him rich.
Eli Whitney's patent for the modern cotton gin. Anglo-French warfare in the early 1790s restricted access to continental Europe, causing the United States to become an important—and temporarily the largest—consumer for British cotton goods. [16] In 1791, U.S. cotton production was small, at only 900 thousand kilograms (2.0 million pounds).
Whitney's gin was produced in response to the state of Georgia's appointed commission for the promotion of a gin suitable to remove seed from fibers on the short-staple, green-seed cotton. Whitney developed the gin at Mulberry Grove Plantation outside Savannah while he was a tutor to the children of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene.