THE COTTON GIN.

In the quiet times that followed the French and Indian War, two years after the Treaty of 1763, Eli Whitney was born in Worcester County in Massachusetts. During the Revolutionary War he was busy making nails by hand, the only way in which nails were made in those days. He earned money enough by this industry and by teaching school to pay his way through college. But it was a slow process, and he was nearly twenty-seven years of age when he was graduated at Yale. Immediately upon his graduation he went to Georgia,—a long distance from home in those days,—having made an engagement to become a private tutor in a wealthy family of that State. On his arrival he found that the man who had engaged his services, unmindful of the contract, had filled the position with another tutor.

The widow of the famous Gen. Nathaniel Greene had a beautiful home at Mulberry Grove, on the Savannah River. Mrs. Greene invited young Whitney to make her house his home while he studied law. She soon perceived that he had great inventive genius. He devised several articles of convenience which Mrs. Greene much appreciated.

At that time the entire cotton crop of this country might have been produced upon a single field of two hundred acres. Cotton then commanded a very high price, because of the labor of separating the cotton fibre from the seed. The cotton clung to the seed with such tenacity that one man could separate the seed from only four or five pounds of cotton in a day. At that rate it would take him three months to make up a bale of clear cotton. Already inventions in machinery for the making of cotton cloth had made the production of cotton a necessity. Some means must be provided for a more rapid separation of cotton from the seed in order to make manufacturing profitable.

One day, one of Mrs. Greene's friends was regretting, in conversation with her, that there could be no profit in the cultivation of cotton. Mrs. Greene had great faith in the inventive powers of young Whitney, and she suggested that he be asked to make a machine which would separate the seed skillfully and rapidly, "for," said she, "Eli Whitney can make anything."

When the workmen in the deep mines of England needed a safety lamp to shield them from the explosions of the damp, they applied to the great chemist, Sir Humphrey Davy, and he invented one. So, these cotton raisers appealed to Mr. Whitney to invent for them a cotton engine or "gin." He knew nothing about either raw cotton or cotton seed. Could he be expected to invent a machine that would separate the cotton seed which he had never seen from the raw cotton which also he had never seen? But Whitney was an inventor. Trifles must not stand in his way. He secured samples of the cotton and the seed; even this was not an easy thing to do, for it was not the right season of the year.

He began to work out his idea of the cotton gin, but met with many obstacles. There were no wire manufactories in the South and he could not obtain wire even in Savannah. Therefore he had to make his wire himself. Still further, he was obliged to manufacture his own iron tools. Step by step he overcame all obstacles, until he had a machine that he thought would answer the purpose.

Accordingly, one day, he entered the room where Mrs. Greene was conversing with friends and exclaimed, "The victory is mine!" All the guests, as well as the hostess, went with the inventor to examine the machine. He set the model in motion. It consisted of a cylinder four feet in length and five inches in diameter. Upon this was a series of circular saws half an inch apart and projecting two inches above the surface of the revolving cylinder. The saws passed through narrow slits between bars; these bars might be called the ribs of the hopper.

At once the saw teeth caught the cotton which had been placed in the hopper and carried it over between the bars. The seed was left behind, as it was too large to pass through. The saws revolved smoothly and the cotton was thoroughly separated from the seed. But after a few minutes the saws became clogged with the cotton and the wheels stopped. Poor Whitney was in despair. Victory was not yet his.

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."