. The library of American history, literature and biography .. . ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON-GIN. Whitney was a New England genius, who graduated at Yale in 1792, andwent to Georgia to teach school, living in the family of General Greenes widow,,Havine heard much of the slow andtedious work of separating the cottonfrom the seed, Whitney undertook tomake a machine for doing the work,which he did in the same year, it was introduced, the entire cot-ton crop of the country could have beengrown on a single field of two hundredacres. A good days work for a manwas cleaning four or five pound
. The library of American history, literature and biography .. . ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON-GIN. Whitney was a New England genius, who graduated at Yale in 1792, andwent to Georgia to teach school, living in the family of General Greenes widow,,Havine heard much of the slow andtedious work of separating the cottonfrom the seed, Whitney undertook tomake a machine for doing the work,which he did in the same year, it was introduced, the entire cot-ton crop of the country could have beengrown on a single field of two hundredacres. A good days work for a manwas cleaning four or five pounds of lint,or a bale of cotton in three gin enabled a man to do thesame work in six days. As a conse-quence of the cheaper and more rapid means of preparing it with the Whitneygin, the cotton crop of the South rose to sudden prominence. In 1800 it waseighteen million pounds; the next year, forty million. Ten years later it waseighty million pounds, which product was more than doubled in the next ten. OLD STYLE PRINTING PRESS. 704 Mccormick and evans. years. In 1830 it was a million bales; two millions in 1840; three in four in i860, Without it modern cotton crops of eight cr nine million baleswould be impossible ; simply to pick the seeds out of the crop of 1S91 in the oldway would have kept the entire working population of the United States busyfor a solid month. It is sad to have to add that Whitneys invention was so extensively piratedthat he derived but little benefit from an invention which has added almostuntold wealth to the country and the world. CYRUS H. MCCORMICK AND THE REAPING-MACHINE. The circumstance that reaping by machinery was as old as the Christian eraand a multitude of comparatively modern attempts had been made, particularlyin England, to apply horse-power to the cutting of grass and grain, only addedto the merit of inventors like Hussey and McCormick, who practically solvedthe problems involved by means so simple and efficient that
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