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: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Domains

Agriculture
Invention

Dates

Date of occurrence 1793-10-28

Places

United States (Location)

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://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1574, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin

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