Student Activity Packet
Activity #1: Inventing the Cotton Gin? A Class Debate
Description
The simple historical statement found in most social studies textbooks tells
us "Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin." After reading the student essay
"Why A Plantation?" and the stories of four claims to the gin's invention, you
will debate who actually did invent the cotton gin. Through this debate,
perhaps you will find that simple historical statements, such as this one,
may be more complex than they first seem. Following the debate, you will
discuss the nature of invention, the importance of history, and the nature of
historical evidence.
Introduction
Most textbooks say simply, "Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin." But
inventions are rarely so simple a story, and the invention of the cotton gin is
no exception. Who really invented the cotton gin? Was it the work of lots of
people, with no one inventor? And why does it matter who invented the
cotton gin, anyway? You will need to think about these questions, and read
the material below, before taking part in the debate over "Who Invented the
Cotton Gin?"
Background
Eli Whitney's cotton gin, demonstration model
1973. Courtesy of National Museum of American History,
Washington, DC.
The cotton gin was a machine designed to remove seeds from picked cotton.
Before the use of the cotton gin, it took a very long time to separate the
seeds from the fibers by hand -- working hard, a person could only clean
about a pound of cotton a day. Ginning made it possible to process the
cotton crop quickly and economically, which meant that many more
landowners started to plant cotton. One person could clean the seeds from
fifty pounds of cotton in one day. The picking of cotton required intensive
labor, but the principal bottleneck had been removed. So the cotton gin was
important because it made cotton a profitable crop. Just as carding,
spinning, and weaving machines made it profitable to produce large amounts
of cloth in factories, the cotton gin made it possible to grow large amounts of
cotton on big farms called plantations. The northern factories were ready to
accept as much raw cotton as the southern growers could ship them.
Thanks in large part to the cotton gin, cotton growing became very
profitable, and cotton quickly became the most important crop across much
of the southern United States. In 1793, before the cotton gin, some 187,600
pounds of cotton was harvested in the United States. Just two years later,
the cotton harvest was over 6 million pounds, and in 1810, it was some 93
million pounds.
The work involved in growing cotton was hot and difficult. In the South,
most of this work was done by African slaves. It is generally accepted that
the gin's ability to quickly remove seeds from cotton, together with the
difficulty of mechanizing the planting, cultivating, and picking of cotton,
helped to fasten slavery on the South. Many African Americans feel strongly
that the invention of the cotton gin prolonged the abuses of slavery. In 1790
there were about 657,000 slaves in the Southern states. In 1810 there were
almost 1.3 million.
Invention and Patents
Lately, Eli Whitney's long-standing claim as sole inventor of the cotton gin
has come under fire. Some historians credit a woman who supported
Whitney at the time of the invention, or the slave community in general. The
gin is also said to be a common device of the period, and Whitney is
portrayed as an opportunist who took advantage of the patent system to
claim ownership. Eli Whitney just got the credit, it is suggested, because of
his skill in manipulating the legal system to get a patent.
The American patent system, provided for in the Constitution, was designed
to encourage the creation and use of new technology. An inventor would
describe an invention, both in writing and with drawings, and submit the
description with a model to a government official. (In the country's first
years, patents were submitted directly to the Secretary of State!) If the
invention was judged to be new and useful, the official would give the
inventor a patent. The patent meant that for 14 years (later changed to 17
years) the inventor owned the new invention. Inventors could license their
ideas to manufacturers, or make or use them themselves. The government
would not issue any other patent for the same idea, and the inventor could
sue in the courts anyone who used the patented idea without paying the
owner of the patent for permission to use it! A useful patent meant that the
inventor could make a lot of money.
In exchange for this governmental protection, the government published the
patent specifications, which had to provide enough information so that other
people could understand the invention -- thus adding to the general
available technological knowledge. And at the end of the 14 years, anyone
could use the invention for free. The idea behind the patent system was
twofold; it would increase the amount of technology, by providing a way for
people to make money off of new ideas, and it would make new technology
widely available, by publicizing ideas, that might otherwise be kept as trade
secrets.
This exercise presents some of the evidence for the claims of four different
groups, each of whom says they invented the cotton gin. People say that:
•
Eli Whitney, a Yale University graduate from Massachusetts who
received a patent for the gin, invented it,
or that:
•
Catharine Greene, on whose plantation Whitney was working when the
gin was developed, actually deserves considerable credit for it,
or that:
•
The work of African slaves on that plantation gave Whitney the idea;
he just mechanized it,
or that:
•
the mechanical cotton gin was a common idea at the time of the
supposed invention; Whitney just developed a new form and patented
it.
The evidence for each claim is presented below. Each group will present
their best evidence to the patent examiner, but you should also consider
what the other groups might say and try to refute their ideas.
While you are preparing your arguments, you will want to think about the
following questions:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Who had the opportunity to make the invention?
Who had the knowledge to make the invention?
Who knew how to claim credit for an invention?
Who had the resources to put the invention to practical application?
What does "invention" really mean?
Why do we care who invented the cotton gin?
ELI WHITNEY'S STORY
Eli Whitney. Courtesy of National
Museum of American History, Washington, DC.
Eli Whitney was born in Westborough, MA in 1765. He was always interested
in machines, working in his father's woodworking shop, taking apart a watch
and putting it back together. At age 14, he set up a nail-making and then a
pin-making shop, and earned a good bit of money. (Note: The evidence for
Eli Whitney's early life was written after he became famous for invention,
and while he was fighting the battles over his rights to the cotton gin. How
reliable are these sources likely to be?)
Whitney attended Yale University, graduating in 1792. He went south to take
a teaching job, but instead he wound up living on the plantation of Catharine
Greene, in Georgia. There he listened to planters describe the difficulty of
cleaning the seeds from cotton. Because of his past success with mechanical
problems, Whitney decided to tackle the problem. Before long he had arrived
at his basic design, which had a cylinder spiked with wire teeth. The raw
cotton was fed onto the cylinder and as it rotated the teeth passed through
narrow slits in a piece of wood, pulling the cotton fibers through but leaving
the seeds behind. Even though Whitney's gin tended to cut the fibers,
thereby lowering the selling price of the cotton, it was so much faster that it
was still by far the most profitable way to get the seeds out.
Whitney was producing and selling his gins in 1794, but he ran into
problems manufacturing them and could not sell nearly as many as he
wanted to. In addition, the design was so easy to copy that other mechanics
made their own or even made them to sell, disregarding Whitney's patent.
Furthermore, many others found small ways to improve the gin, and some
made significant improvements, such as replacing the wire teeth with rows
of toothed disks like dull circular-saw blades. Whitney filed 24 lawsuits
between 1795 and 1805 to protect his patent rights.
CATHARINE GREENE'S STORY
Catharine Greene, 1807. Courtesy of
General Nathanial Greene Homestead, Coventry, RI.
Mrs. Catharine Greene, the widow of a prominent general in the
Revolutionary War, lived on a plantation in Georgia. She hired Eli Whitney as
a tutor. Once there, he got interested in the cotton ginning problem. Mrs.
Greene supported him, giving him food, lodging, and encouragement while
he developed his gin. According to a recent biography of Greene,
One evening, . . . Whitney remarked that he had reached an impasse. The
unfinished model was brought downstairs and placed on the dinner table. As
the company gathered around, Whitney cranked the wooden cylinder of his
new machine, applying raw cotton from the upper side. As the fibers were
caught up by the cylinder teeth and carried through a row of narrow slots,
the seeds were wrenched free and dropped below. There remained one last
problem to be overcome. The fibers, though separated from their seeds,
continued to cling to the cylinder teeth, eventually clogging the slots. It was
Caty who first perceived a solution. Seizing a hearth brush standing at the
nearby fireplace, she applied it to the cylinder. The bristles were too limber
to remove the cotton efficiently, but Whitney was impressed. "Thank you for
the hint," he said. "I have it now."
THE AFRICAN SLAVES' STORY
Slaves harvesting cotton. From The Progress of Cotton,
1835-40 Courtesy of Slater Mill Historic Site, Pawtucket, RI.
Slaves, because they were not citizens, could not register any invention with
the patent office. Their owners could not register a slave's invention either,
since the law required that the patent be issued to the actual inventor.
Consequently, any free person wanting to patent something could not
acknowledge any contribution from a slave. And so it was easy to steal a
slave's ideas and patent them.
According to Portia James, in The Real McCoy: African-American Invention
and Innovation, 1619-1930,
Eli Whitney . . . has been charged with borrowing the idea for the cotton gin
from a simple comblike device that slaves used to clean the cotton. Whitney
is said to have merely enlarged upon the idea of the comb to create the
cotton gin, which works very much like an oversized comb culling the seeds
and debris from the cotton. Whitney may have borrowed the idea, which
though valuable was still incomplete. He may have used the principle behind
the slaves' device and applied it to the broader problem--how to clean vast
quantities of cotton.
Another historian writing about the problems facing African American
inventors has noted:
"Whether slave or free the Negro could not proceed far in matters requiring
the sanction of government except under the tutelage of some white man.
Often what the Negro actually developed was exploited by the white man by
whom he was employed or through whom he endeavored to find
recognition." (Dorothy Yancy, "Four Black Inventors with Patents," Negro
History Bulletin 39 [1976]: 574.)
So, while historians have accepted the theory that Eli Whitney's cotton gin
idea came from an African slave, this claim remains impossible to prove.
THE SOUTHERN PLANTERS' STORY
Southern plantation house. Courtesy of The Library of Congress
The cotton gin is an ancient invention. As long ago as the 1st millennium BC,
mechanical devices were used to remove seeds from cotton. The roller gin,
which used two smooth rollers to squeeze the seeds out of the cotton, was
used in the Bahamas and on the Sea Islands of Georgia, where long-staple
cotton was grown in the 18th century. One person operating this handcranked gin could produce about 24 to 30 pounds of cotton a day.
Roller Gin. Courtesy of National
Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
Quite a few inventors improved the roller gin, though none of them are
famous today. The problem was that the roller gin could not remove the
seeds from short-staple cotton. Nevertheless, according to this perspective,
the mechanical gin was already commonplace, and Whitney's gin is just
another mechanical gin. The real key was mechanization, and that was
already the accepted way to gin cotton.
Click above to see a Quicktime video of a roller gin demonstration
from the Smithsonian's Hands-On-History Room.
Even considering just the gins for short-staple cotton, it seems clear that
Whitney's invention was only one small step in the production of a usable
gin. Several inventors had developed ways to use saw-like devices to gin
cotton before Whitney, but none worked very well. (One was Hodgen
Holmes, a mechanic in South Carolina, who had begun to apply for a patent
of a sawtooth gin five years before Whitney, but was unable to successfully
complete his application.) Whitney's patent, granted in 1794, used spike
teeth -- which were not as easy to make and use as gins that used
sawteeth, as Holmes had suggested. Holmes finally received a patent on the
sawtooth gin in 1796. (Indeed, Whitney turned to sawteeth in his later
models.)
Whitney's gin, southern planters argued, was just one step along the way to
a workable gin -- and not the most important step. His real skills, they
claimed, were manipulating the legal system to get credit and having good
business skills that enabled him to sell many gins (he received royalties
worth some $90,000).
Copyright © 1998 The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.
Comments and questions to the Lemelson Center:[email protected]
Last Revision: 6/5/98