[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF WHITNEY
_In this house in Westborough, Massachusetts, Eli Whitney was born on
December 8, 1765._]
Take, for example, the results that have flowed from a single
invention, that of the Whitney cotton gin. When the young Yankee
schoolmaster and law student, Eli Whitney, was graduated from Yale and
settled in Georgia in 1792, the production of cotton in the Southern
States was insignificant. At that time, indeed, cotton was grown by the
Southerners chiefly for decorative effect in gardens, because of its
handsome flowers. Its cultivation for commercial purposes was virtually
out of the question, owing to the fact that no means were available for
economically separating the lint from the seed. This had to be done by
hand, and since it took ten hours for a quick worker to separate one
pound of lint from its three pounds of seed no adequate returns could
be had.
What was needed, as his southern friends pointed out to Whitney, was
the invention of some apparatus for performing the work of separation
cleanly and quickly. The problem was one that appealed to him with
peculiar force. Even as a boy in Massachusetts he had been fond of
tinkering with mechanical appliances. At the early age of twelve he had
made a violin of fairly good tone; a year later he was making excellent
knives; and before he was fifteen he was recognized as the best
mechanic in his native town of Westborough. It was therefore with real
enthusiasm that he set up a workshop in the basement of his Georgia
home, and varied his law studies by experimenting in the manufacture of
a cotton gin. Within a few months he had successfully completed his
self-imposed task by the creation of a machine equipped with hundreds
of tiny metal fingers, each of which did more work in quicker time than
the human hand could possibly do.
That same year (1793) fully five million pounds of cotton were
harvested in the United States, the product of a planting stimulated
solely by faith in the Whitney gin. By the year of Whitney’s death
(1825) cotton was indisputably king in the commercial life of the
nation, the value of the cotton exports for that year being more than
$36,000,000, as against a valuation of barely $30,000,000 for all
other American exports. The eventual abolition of slavery served only
to accentuate the stupendous importance of the cotton gin. Under free
labor the production of cotton has steadily risen, until nowadays it
annually runs into the billions of pounds, with a valuation of many
hundreds of millions of dollars, and affords employment not only to an
enormous army of cultivators, but to a still greater army of workers in
factory, office, and store.
[Illustration: THE FULTON HOMESTEAD
_The inventor purchased this farm in Washington County, Pennsylvania,
when he was but twenty-one years of age. Here he left his mother when
he went to England to study art._]
Even of much greater importance have been the results of the labors
of another illustrious American inventor, Robert Fulton. Born in
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in November, 1765, Fulton, by reason
of the astonishing number and variety of his inventions, may well be
called the Edison of his time.