![]() ![]() But Whitney got the credit for inventing the cotton gin in the pages of history. And the cotton gin would make cotton the cash crop of the entire South. ![]() When Eli Whitney tried to charge local farmers what they thought were exorbitant fees for use of the machine, they started building their own. But she was happy enough to be able to use the machine on her plantation. Douglas Brinkley(moderator) is a bestselling author and serves as presidential historian for CNN and the New-York Historical Society. At the time, women could not file patents. A New York Timesbestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, his latest book is Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West. The West was where riches would reward the miners persistence, the cattlemans courage, the railroad mans enterprise but El Dorado was at least as elusive in. ![]() He nearly gave up but Catharine suggested using wire instead of wood and it worked. His first design featured wooden teeth and worked very poorly. She told Eli of the problem and had an idea for creating a machine with teeth that might make the process much easier. Whitney was from New England and was unfamiliar with cotton farming but Catharine and her husband had been vexed by the difficulty of raising green-seed cotton and separating cotton from the seeds. In 1792, she rented out a room in her home to a young man named Eli Whitney, who also worked for her as a handyman. ![]()
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