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
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 encourage 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 next. 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 nailmaking 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.
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.
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).