He took this back
with him and set to work to make a machine which would strip off the
seeds.
He said to himself, If I fasten some upright pieces of wire in a board,
and have the wires set very close together, like the teeth of a comb,
and then pull the cotton wool through the wires with my fingers, the
seeds, being too large to come through, will be torn off and left
behind. He tried it, and found that the cotton wool came through
without any seeds on it. Now, said he, if I should make a wheel, and
cover it with short steel teeth, shaped like hooks, those teeth would
pull the cotton wool through the wires better than my fingers do,
and very much faster.
[Illustration: WHITNEY'S FIRST CONTRIVANCE FOR PULLING OFF THE
COTTON SEEDS.]
He made such a wheel; it was turned by a crank; it did the work
perfectly; so, in the year 1793, he had invented the machine the
planters wanted.
Before that time it used to take one negro all day to clean a single
pound of cotton of its seeds by picking them off one by one; now,
Eli Whitney's cotton-gin,[5] as he called his machine, would clean
a thousand pounds in a day.
[Footnote 5: Gin: a shortened form of the word _engine_, meaning any
kind of a machine.]
181. Price of common cotton cloth to-day; what makes it so cheap;
"King Cotton.
Pages:
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184