At Home - Bill Bryson [213]
With power looms humming, the cotton industry was ready to take off, but the mills needed far more cotton than existing sources could supply. The obvious place to grow it was the American south. The climate, too hot and dry for many crops, was perfect for cotton. Unfortunately, the only variety that would grow well in most southern soils was a difficult type known as short staple cotton. This was impossible to harvest profitably because each boll was packed with sticky seeds—three pounds of them for every pound of cotton fiber—and these had to be hand-plucked one by one. Separating seeds from fiber was such a labor-intensive operation that even with slave labor it could not be done economically. The costs of feeding and clothing the slaves were far greater than the amount of usable cotton that even the most diligent hand-plucking could produce.
The man who solved the problem grew up a long way from any plantations. His name was Eli Whitney, he came from Westborough, Massachusetts, and, if all the elements of the story are true (which, as we are about to see, they may not be), it was the luckiest of chances that allowed him to make his name immortal.
The story as conventionally told is this: After graduating from Yale in 1793, Whitney accepted a job as a tutor to a family in South Carolina, but upon arriving discovered that the promised salary was to be halved. Offended, he refused the position, which satisfied honor but left him fundless and a long way from home.
While sailing south he had met a vivacious young widow named Catharine Greene, wife of the late General Nathanael Greene, a hero of the American Revolution. A grateful nation had awarded Greene a plantation in Georgia for his support of George Washington through the darkest hours of the war. Unfortunately, Greene, a New Englander, was unused to Georgian heat, and on his first summer there fatally keeled over from sunstroke. It was to Greene’s widow that Whitney turned now.
Mrs. Greene was by this time cohabiting enthusiastically and fairly openly with another Yale man named Phineas Miller, her plantation manager, and they welcomed Whitney into their household. There Whitney was introduced to the cotton seed problem. Examining a boll, he at once thought he could see a solution. He retired to the plantation workshop and devised a simple rotating drum that used nails to snag cotton fiber as it turned, leaving the seeds behind. His new device was so efficient that it could do the work of fifty slaves. Whitney patented his gin (a shortened form of engine) and prepared to become stupendously wealthy.
That is the story as conventionally told. It appears, however, that a good deal of it may not actually be quite true. The suggestion now is that Whitney already knew Miller—their Yale connection does seem improbably coincidental otherwise—that he was acquainted with the problems of growing cotton on American soil, and that he traveled south, probably at Miller’s behest, knowing that he would try to invent a gin. Moreover, it appears that the work may not have been done in a couple of hours on the plantation, but over weeks or months in a workshop back in Westborough.
Whatever the actuality of its invention, the gin truly