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  • Essay / The biography of Eli Whitney

    “A man and a horse will make more than 50 men with the old machines” (“NATIONAL ARCHIVES”) is said to have said Eli Whitney. But his greatest achievement was the invention of the cotton gin. This is to show all the help and a little pain that this man has created for this new America. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayOn a small farm near Westborough Massachusetts (Great Lives 222), on December 8, 1765, a baby boy was born just before the war of independence. His name was Eli Whitney. He earned the title of eldest of four. But later, after the collage, he will invent something that could help and harm lives in America. At the age of 23, he decided to go to Yale to study collage. He was known to be a “natural philosopher”. (Great Lives 223) When he was in collage he met a woman named Catherine Greene (Great Lives 228), she later became known as his manager and also introduced him to his partner. After collage, he moved to Georgia to become a tutor, hence his curiosity about cotton. Cotton was and still is a major crop in America. We use cotton for many things like clothes, blankets, hats and many more. One of the main reasons cotton became a cash crop is that tobacco causes soil depletion. There are three types of cotton plants: long-staple, medium-staple and short-staple. Long fibers are the easiest to use, pick and extract seeds. But long fibers are only grown on the coast. Long fibers have smooth seeds, which are the best seeds to select because they are the easiest and are also less sticky than other seeds. There is another variety that is grown inland, but it contains very sticky green seeds. Green seeds are the most difficult to select. Although cotton has been around for a while, the reason it really came to be in England is because Arab traders traded cotton with the English. But in Eli Whitney's time, England imported nine million pounds of cotton. After moving to the south and seeing how the cotton plantations worked. Eli began to think: "How can I make a cotton plantation run smoothly and more comfortably?" He begins to create a “first model” of Cotton Gin. In 1793, he created a first model. This model took approximately 6 months to complete. But this is how it works, you lay down the cotton then turn the crank, like you turn a toothed cylinder rotating against an iron cage, (Great Lives 226) as the cotton advances, the toothed cylinder, the teeth hold the seeds of cotton like cotton fiber slips however. People never thought that getting seeds from cotton would be so easy. Before obtaining a paten, a final model would have to be invented. This final model was finalized in the 1820s. With its final model, there are two types of gins. One is a small crank for small farms and then they have a larger water or horse gin that is for larger farms or large plantations. The small crank is very similar to the first model. They had teeth through which fibers could pass but not seeds, but they did not have the iron cage like the first model. Before, a man could remove the seeds from 50 balls of cotton in about fifty minutes to an hour, but with gin he could make fifty balls in a minute. With his gin he controlled it exclusively for 14 years, but then.