Eli WhitneyEli Whitney was born 8 December 1765 in Westborough, Massachusetts. His creative mind had already started to go to work by age 12, when he made a violen. During his teen years he had a nail-making business to keep him busy. Then in 1783 he started teaching grammer school and continued for three years, until in 1789 he accomplished his dream of attending school at Yale. After attending college he traveled to Savanna, Georgia to teach law. There he befriended a woman who invited him to stay with her while he was in town. Her name was Catherine Littlefield Greene. Whitney helped around her house coming up with little ways to make their household life easier, but one day Greene asked Whitney if he could find a way to sift cotton from its surrounding seeds. Whitney took on the challenge and according to legend, had invented the ?Cotton Gin? in a matter of ten days.
A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum.
English: "Eli Whitney," portrait of the inventor, ...
South side of monument at Eli Whitney grave in Gro...His creation of the first Cotton Gin was finished in April of 1793. He then got a patent on his invention, but it was too easy for the the pirating of the cotton gin to take place for Whitney to make any money. Whitney?s business was forced to be shut down in 1797. When his patent expired in 1807, congress refused to renew it. Whitney answered the government?s action with these words: ?An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.? This invention was definitely worth a lot to the south, but his Uniformity System took over the whole country.
In 1798 the federal government awarded Eli Whitney with a $134,000 contract to produce and deliver 10,000 muskets to the United States of America. With this, Whitney came up with the Uniformity System, where randomly selected parts could...