7 Eli Whitney 7experiments in science and the applied arts, as technology
was then called. After graduation in the fall of 1792,
Whitney was disappointed twice in promised teaching
posts. The second offer was in Georgia, where, stranded
without employment, short of cash, and far from home,
he was befriended by Catherine Greene. Phineas Miller, a
young man of Whitney’s age, Connecticut-born and Yale-
educated, managed Mulberry Grove, Greene’s splendid
plantation. Miller and Whitney became friends.
At a time when English mills were hungry for cotton,
the South exported a small amount of the black-seed, long-
staple variety. Though it could easily be cleaned of its seed
by passing it through a pair of rollers, its cultivation was
limited to the coast. On the other hand, a green-seed,
short-staple variety that grew in the interior resisted
cleaning; its fibre adhered to the seed. Whitney saw that
a machine to clean the green-seed cotton could make the
South prosperous and make its inventor rich. He set to
work and constructed a crude model. Whitney’s cotton
gin had four parts: (1) a hopper to feed the cotton into
the gin; (2) a revolving cylinder studded with hundreds of
short wire hooks, closely set in ordered lines to match
fine grooves cut in (3) a stationary breastwork that strained
out the seed while the fibre flowed through; and (4) a
clearer, which was a cylinder set with bristles, turning in
the opposite direction, that brushed the cotton from the
hooks and let it fly off by its own centrifugal force.
After perfecting his machine Whitney secured a
patent (1794), and he and Miller went into business manu-
facturing and servicing the new gins. However, the
unwillingness of the planters to pay the service costs and
the ease with which the gins could be pirated put the
partners out of business by 1797.
The planters’ ability to defeat lawsuits brought against
them by Whitney for infringement of patent rights and