Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin

Historical Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University)

Domains

Agriculture
Invention

Dates

Date of occurrence 1793-10-28

Places

United States (Location)

Resources

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Eli Whitney (1765-1825) was the son of a Massachusetts farmer who studied Applied Arts at Yale College and went to work on a cotton plantation in Georgia. There he invented his “cotton gin”, a machine which combed out short-fibre cotton and separated it from its seed husks. The importance of the cotton gin was that it made possible the economic exploitation of the kind of short-fibre cotton which grows well in the southern United States, thus enabling the expansion of cotton as a staple crop, especially in Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee.

Please see our entry on The Industrial Revolution.

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100 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 June 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1574, accessed 16 April 2024.]

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