Eli Whitney - Coton Gin
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman - Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Biological Systems and Agricultural Engineering Design |
| Special Topic(s): |
History of Technology Women Inventors |
| Learning Resource Type: | Reference - Article/Document |
| Media Type: | WWW |
| Author(s): | Lemelson-MIT Program |
| Description: | Inventor profile on the Lemelson inventor site. Excpert: "The third best known American inventor of the pre-atomic age, after Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, is probably Eli Whitney. Whitney certainly transformed the economies of the antebellum North and South. But among invention aficionados, his invention of the cotton gin is a matter of some dispute. En route, in early 1793, Whitney was befriended by Katherine Greene, the widow of a Revolutionary War general. When Whitney's teaching job later fell through, Greene invited him to stay at her plantation, Mulberry Grove, where she thought he might make himself helpful. As Whitney soon discovered, most cotton plantations were then on the brink of insolvency, because "green seed" cotton, the only strain that would grow inland, took too long to cull from its seeds. To sift out a single "point" of cotton lint from its surrounding seeds required ten hard hours of hand labor. Everyone agreed that the solution was a machine to do this work; but no one had been able to make one. According to legend, within ten days of his arrival Whitney had observed the manual process and built a machine that did the same thing much faster. It is clear that his very first model did not work. In it, the bulk cotton was pressed against a wire screen, which held back the seeds while wooden teeth jutting out from an adjacent rotating drum teased the cotton fibers out through the mesh. This model invariably jammed. The next version was a complete success, thanks to thin wire hooks replacing the wooden teeth, and a moving brush that constantly cleared away the collected fibers. By all accounts, Greene encouraged Whitney. The vexed question is whether the key element, the wire hooks, was his idea or hers. Greene supporters cite the claim of a friend of a friend of her plantation foreman, that Greene invoked "a woman's wit" and told Whitney to replace his wooden pegs with the wires of a fireplace cleaning brush. Whitney supporters cite a letter to the editor of Southern Agriculturalist magazine, whose author heard from admittedly shadowy sources that Whitney had explicitly asked Greene for a pin to experiment with at the start of his efforts. (Note that for some time during his Massachusetts days, Whitney had been the New World's sole manufacturer of hatpins.)" |
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| Keywords: | Eli Whitney, Cotton Gin, Catherine Greene, women inventors, gender equity |
| Usage Tip | |
| Use of Resource: | Part of Lemelson's Inventor of the Week collection. Recognizes the contributions of others in the invention, particularly that of Katherine Greene. |
| Difficulty: | Easy |
| Interactivity Level: | Medium |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | 2008 |
| Platform/Format: | WWW |
| Cost: | Free |
| Download URL: | http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/whitney.html |
| Metadata: | IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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