The guidelines he presented would later be ignored as industrialization took on a harsher regard for worker well-being.
In , Whitney wed Henrietta Edwards. The couple would have several children, with Eli Whitney Jr. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Whitney Houston was an American singer and actress whose first four albums, released between and , amassed global sales in excess of 86 million copies.
Samuel Colt was an inventor and industrialist who created the revolver and paved the way for the interchangeable parts system of manufacturing. Civil rights leader Whitney Young Jr. Elias Howe was an American inventor best know for creating and parenting the first practical sewing machine.
Garrett Morgan blazed a trail for African American inventors with his patents, including those for a hair-straightening product, a breathing device, a revamped sewing machine and an improved traffic signal. Lewis Howard Latimer was an inventor and draftsman best known for his contributions to the patenting of the light bulb and the telephone. During the Revolutionary War he manufactured nails to fill the demand caused by British embargos.
Young Eli quickly learned how the marketplace worked, and diversified into hatpins and canes. It was his genius to observe what people needed, and to provide it. There he saw how hard it was to separate the green seeds from short-staple cotton. Meyer in their classic study about the issue argued that slavery depended on its economic survival for the spread of the institution to the Southwest in the s.
Regardless, the cotton gin was one of the significant inventions that changed American history in broad, generational ways. Toggle navigation. Link : See The Approved Patent Much of that cotton made its way to Northern manufacturers to be made into clothing and other products. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Despite its success, the gin made little money for Whitney due to patent-infringement issues. Also, his invention offered Southern planters a justification to maintain and expand slavery even as a growing number of Americans supported its abolition.
Based in part on his reputation for creating the cotton gin, Whitney later secured a major contract to build muskets for the U. Through this project, he promoted the idea of interchangeable parts—standardized, identical parts that made for faster assembly and easier repair of various devices.
For his work, he is credited as a pioneer of American manufacturing. Eli Whitney was born on December 8, , in Westborough, Massachusetts. Growing up, Whitney, whose father was a farmer, proved to be a talented mechanic and inventor. Among the objects he designed and built as a youth were a nail forge and a violin. He originally planned to work as a private tutor but instead accepted an invitation to stay with Catherine Greene — , the widow of American Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, on her plantation, known as Mulberry Grove, near Savannah, Georgia.
While there, Whitney learned about cotton production—in particular, the difficulty cotton farmers faced making a living. In many ways, cotton was an ideal crop; it was easily grown, and unlike food crops its fibers could be stored for long periods of time. But cotton plants contained seeds that were difficult to separate from the soft fibers. A type of cotton known as long staple was easy to clean, but grew well only along coastal areas.
The vast majority of cotton farmers were forced to grow the more labor-intensive short-staple cotton, which had to be cleaned painstakingly by hand, one plant at a time. The average cotton picker could remove the seeds from only about one pound of short-staple cotton per day. Greene and her plantation manager, Phineas Miller , explained the problem with short-staple cotton to Whitney, and soon thereafter he built a machine that could effectively and efficiently remove the seeds from cotton plants.
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