Why Is Eli Whitney The Perfect Man

There have been countless Americans that have helped shape this country into the great nation that it is. If there were a list of the top one hundred greatest and most influential Americans, Eli Whitney should be definitely be on that list, he is by far more than qualified. Although, it is true that he was not a perfect man, Eli Whitney changed the course of agriculture in the south and left his mark on the United States of America. Whitney was an American inventor and mechanical engineer, whose many inventions helped push America towards the future that lay ahead in the industrial revolution. Eli Whitney was a man of many skills and among that list of talents, he had the burning passion for inventing things and for understanding what
Little did he know, that one day, he would go on to change the course of the nation.“Whitney had an instinctive understanding of mechanisms. It was a medium in which he could improvise and create in exactly the same way that a poet handles words or a painter uses color.” Later on in his life he studied at Yale with the intentions of becoming a lawyer. He graduated in 1792 and was hired as a tutor in South Carolina. However, he turned down the job offer and accepted another at the Mulberry Grove Plantation. The farm was originally a tobacco plantation, but when the market started to rapidly decline, they decided to switch to cotton. Greenseed cotton was widely and commonly available. Cotton grew very well in the southern climate, therefore, it was an intelligent decision for the success of the farm. The only downside to this seemingly flawless solution, was that it took hours of hard, labor intensive, manual labor to correctly separate the seeds from the cotton bolls. Whitney saw this struggle in the workplace and rose to the occasion to do something about it. "Gentlemen," said Mrs. Greene, "apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney. He can make anything." He worked through the freezing winter to create a machine that would eventually revolutionize cotton farming in the
Cotton was run through a wooden drum embedded with a series of hooks that caught the fibers and dragged them through a mesh. Whitney’s hand-cranked machine could produce more cotton in a single hour that what had previously been able to be produced by multiple workers in an entire day. The cotton gin was patented in 1794 and the radical change to the cotton farming industry had begun. Due to the simplicity of the design, many other farmers were able to create a version of their own. Because of this, Whitney filed many lawsuits against them and received almost no profit off of his spectacular and revolutionary invention. Still, the cotton gin had transformed the American