Eli WHITNEY
1913 - Misfortunes of Inventors

ELI WHITNEY.—Inventor of the cotton gin
It should have brought him millions, but he tried to control the sale and the impatient planters began to make the machine for themselves and so he lost his profits.

Bit Whitney invented the cotton gin. Whitney, who had great mechanical skill, was a New Englander who went to the south and, on the plantation of General Nathaniel Greene of Revolutionary fame, saw the slaves separating lint from the cotton seed by hand. Few things that came from the brain of $1,000,000,000. The South may be aald to clothe the world. It takes l,000 or more steamships to transport the cotton which England alone buys from the South each year.

From his invention, which may be classed as one of the ten most important in history, Whitney never got a dollar of profit. Immediately upon the introduction of the gin, dozens of persons pirated the Invention. Whitney tried to protect his legal rights and soon became involved in a lot of lawsuits. Some of them he won without much trouble. Some of the more important were carried from court to court and were dragged interminably. The affair became one of the scandals of the time. Mr. Whitney, disgusted with the protracted and expensive litigation, nearly at the end of his financial resources and despairing of ever getting justice in the courts, determined to let the world have the benefit of his Invention without profit to himself. The state of Georgia, In recognition of what It had benefited through the gin. voted $50,000 to him. That did not cover the legal costs, the lawyers' fees and the time he had given to the creation of the gin. but with this money he embarked in business in New England in the manufacture of firearms and made enough money to live in comparative ease.

Morning Express
Buffalo, New York
1913

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