The invention that helped preserve the cotton industry in the United States took place on General Nathaniel Greene's plantation near Savannah. Separating the lint from the seed of the desired upland cotton by hand yielded only one pound per day per person. Eli Whitney, a Massachusetts native and Yale Law graduate, came to Georgia in late 1792 at age 27 to teach school. Mrs. Catherine Greene, General Greene's widow, invited him to her plantation and urged him to create a cotton gin. In the spring of 1793, after ten days of working in seclusion with a basket of cotton bolls, he found that a hooked wire could pull lint through a slot while leaving the seeds behind. In his patent application, Whitney described a machine with spikes driven into a wooden cylinder, a slotted bar through which the spikes passed, and a brush to clear the spikes. The resulting hand-operated cotton gin produced more than fifty pounds per person per day and was patented on March 14, 1794. Henry Ogden Holmes of Georgia later invented an improved gin on the Kincaide plantation in Fairfield County, South Carolina, and received a patent on May 12, 1796. His continuous-flow gin used rip-saw teeth on a circular steel blade passing through spaces between ribs. With later improvements, the circular saw gin was still in use in 1985 and could produce thousands of pounds per day, helping support a new worldwide industry through cotton shipped from the Port of Savannah and bringing prosperity to the South.

Photo: Shane Oliver

Photo: Mike Stroud

Photo: Mike Stroud

Photo: Mike Stroud

Savannah, Georgia · USA