APPENDIX
Did Eli Whitney Invent the Cotton Gin?
ANGELA LAKWETE IS AN AUBURN UNIVERSITY HISTORIAN WHO HAS devoted a career to the antebellum cotton industry. In a recent book, she argues that Whitney’s gin was of only minor importance in generating the explosive growth of the King Cotton plantation culture in the South; for as she concludes, “ginning was not a bottleneck as the nineteenth century dawned.”
1 But although she never makes the specific charge, Lakwete also lays out an impressive prima facie case that, rather than invent the new gin, Whitney and Phineas Miller, his cotton gin partner, stole a gin design and patented it as their own. I’ve added a few details that, looked at anew, seem to strengthen the case.
The Whitney Cotton Gin Revisited
There is no question that Whitney was a talented craftsman. Although many stories of his youthful inventing prowess are probably apocryphal, he was blacksmithing by his early teens and was a skilled metalworker.
When Whitney secured his tutorship in South Carolina in 1792, he traveled south with Miller. They were close in age, though Miller had graduated from Yale seven years before. Miller had gone to Georgia as the tutor of the children of Gen. Nathanael and Catherine Greene, who lived on a rice plantation. When the general suddenly died, Miller took over as overseer of the plantation. Miller invited Whitney to stay at the plantation for a few weeks in October, before taking up his tutoring position in November. Whitney was utterly infatuated with Greene.
2 (But so apparently was Miller: he and Greene married in 1796, with George Washington and his wife as witnesses.)
Nothing further is heard from Whitney until April 1793, when he reported to a friend, Josiah Stebbins, that he had not taken up his tutoring position, had never left the plantation, and had no prospects and no money. A letter to his father on the same day told the same sad tale, adding apologies for his debts. Just a few weeks later, however, on May 1, Whitney wrote another letter to Stebbins announcing that “Dame Fortune” had made him “very expert in the Hocus-Pocus line,” and that he expected shortly to have plenty of money.
3That sets the stage for Lakwete’s case. The new gin, to begin with, is a “technical marvel,” a radical rethinking of current gin technology. Each element of it—an iron-toothed wooden rolling cylinder, a grated breastwork to filter seeds, a breastwork cleaner, and a seed hopper—had to be of a precise design, precisely aligned. That is impressive, for cotton processing was a strongly empirical craft. Gins had evolved over many years, with improvements typically coming from people deeply involved in the industry. Yet by Whitney’s account, he had by chance heard men speaking of ginning problems “and struck out a plan of a Machine in my mind.” Once conceived, it took him only “about ten Days” to build a model.
4Lakwete underscores the role of the breastwork in the Whitney gin. Its thickness matched the average length of a cotton fiber, and the spacing of the grate and teeth was designed to block most cotton seeds. “There is no precedent for that anywhere,” she writes, “including any carding machines anywhere at any time.”
5 In operation, the cylinder rotated the teeth through the grates in the breastwork, pulling seeded cotton from the hopper, as the seeds fell from the grate. A rapidly revolving cleaner on the other side of the breastwork helped pull through the now-seedless cotton and freed it from the wire teeth. In a letter to his father in September 1793, Whitney said that after quickly building his first model, he had spent the rest of the previous winter “perfecting the Machine,” completing a working version “that required the labor of one man to turn it.”
6Greene knew Thomas Jefferson, who as secretary of state held the patent portfolio. Miller wrote him on May 27, recommending Whitney and his new machine, which Whitney had devised “without tools or workmen.” A few days later, he urged Whitney, who had gone back to New Haven, to expedite the patent application, for there were “two other claimants for the honor of the invention of cotton gins, in addition to those we knew before.” Whitney delivered the patent petition on June 20 and followed with detailed specifications and drawings in mid-October.
7 To complete the filing, he still had to provide a working model of the new gin,
bx which took him another six months, apparently because of difficulties in fixing the shaped wire teeth in the wooden cylinder. But it was finally delivered in March 1794, and Jefferson issued the patent, retroactive to the previous November, when he had received the drawings and descriptions.
Without waiting for an accepted filing, Miller launched a preemptive business strategy. The plan was to create ginning mills throughout the cotton areas, charging 40 percent of the cotton ginned, while at the same time fighting off any competitive gins with litigation. The struggle that ensued would be tedious to recount. Suffice it to say that the Miller-Whitney strategy prompted a wave of competitive gins, some of which were patented, and litigation dragged on for years. Whether Whitney ever made any money out of it isn’t clear. The venture appears to have been funded almost entirely by the Greene estate, which was financially troubled to begin with. Miller died suddenly in 1803.
The most formidable competitive gins, some of which were also patented, substituted fine-toothed circular metal saw blades on a shaft for the toothed wooden cylinder—a lighter, easier-to-build solution. The “saw gins,” as they were called, spread rapidly, forcing Miller to shift his patent strategy to include the saw gin, on the grounds that it was indistinguishable from Whitney’s wire-toothed version and—what was crucial under then-current law—that it was part of Whitney’s original conception, simply one of several approaches he had always considered as interchangeable.
To back up that story, Miller asked Whitney to depose his friends on “the subject of ratchet wheels.” Whitney duly asked Stebbins to write a statement that said: “Whitney repeatedly told me that he had originally contemplated making a whole row of teeth from one plate or piece of metal.”
8 Stebbins never furnished such a statement, although Whitney and Miller stoutly maintained that position. (Another friend, Elizur Goodrich, a congressman, Whitney’s adviser, and an investor in Whitney’s later enterprises, did testify in support of their claim.) Whitney’s version in the court was that, while building his first model, “not being able to procure sheet iron or sheets of tined plates”
9 on the plantation, he fell back on using wire teeth emplaced in wood.
The Case Against Whitney
The various Miller-Whitney accounts are riddled with inconsistencies. To begin with, it is hardly credible that Whitney, with no experience in the cotton industry, more or less immediately conceived such a complex solution upon a chance overhearing of a conversation. The claim that he quickly built a pilot model—including the iron breastwork with its long row of precisely aligned, smaller-than-a-cotton-seed grating slits—also stretches credulity, the more so when compounded with Miller’s statement that he did it without “tools or workmen.” Further, if Whitney had really spent the winter of 1792–1793 “perfecting” a working model of his gin, as he told his father, it is hard to explain why he didn’t simply ship it to Jefferson’s office. And if the saw gin had been Whitney’s first choice all along, as he claimed, it’s even harder to explain why he struggled to make the wire-toothed solution when he was under time pressure to deliver a model and even later, through the first several years of the business.
The wire-toothed cylinder was a simple component but a fussy manufacturing challenge. The original Whitney patent material was lost in the Patent Office fire of 1836, but an 1803 copy of Whitney’s description, certified by James Madison, then secretary of state, was later recovered by the Whitney family and is available at the patent office. It does not specify the number of teeth but recommends that the wooden cylinder be from two to five feet long and from six to nine inches in diameter; that the spaces between the rows of teeth “ought not to be less than seven sixteenths of an inch,” and that the spaces “between the teeth in the same row must be so small as not to admit a seed or a half seed; they ought not to exceed one twelfth of an inch, and I think about one sixteenth of an inch the best.”
10 The patent drawings suggest fifty-two teeth, which would be about a third of an inch apart on a six-inch diameter cylinder. Even at that number, with half-inch spacing, a two-foot long cylinder would still have nearly 2,500 teeth. The drawing shown in
Figure A.1, which the patent office argues is an original one, has fifty-two teeth per row but apparently a very large number of rows. (See images 1 and 6 in
Figure A.1.)
by11Such a device could only be fashioned by hand. The placement of the rows on the cylinder and the gratings on the breastwork had to be a precise match, and all the teeth in each row had to be so aligned that they could rotate at speed through the grating. (I assume Whitney used a stencil to place the teeth.) Then the teeth had to be properly bent and sharpened to engage the cotton. In the patent description Whitney described how he drew out the wire to strengthen it, cut it into approximately one-inch lengths, and used a tool and a gauge to shape each one. He then flattened one end of each and drove them into the cylinder with “a light hammer” before trimming them to the right length with “a pair of cutting pliers.” The cylinder was then “secured in a lathe” and the teeth filed to “a kind of angular point” and finished off with a polishing file.
12 A major problem, Whitney told Stebbins, was that placing so many teeth split the cylinder, until he finally figured out a way to place them across the grain.
Figure A.1., the Patent Drawings for Whitney Gin. This drawing was found in the records of a Savannah lawsuit, one of the many that ensued after Whitney’s patent was filed. It bore the certificate of James Madison, dated 1804, and was published in a 1960 article by a senior patent official, along with evidence for its accuracy and originality.
Connect all those dots: The sudden shift in Whitney’s self-assessment of his prospects in the second half of April 1792. The urgency to perfect the patent before other multiplying potential claimants, including “those we knew before.” The inconsistencies between the tales of where and how easily the plantation model was built and Whitney’s labors to construct one in New Haven. The glibness with which the two appropriated the saw gin, and the blatant appeal to Stebbins. Any one of them might easily be explained away, but taken together, they raise a dark suspicion that Miller and Whitney, for all their talents, were dishonest young men on the make, trying to profit from a claim-jumping patent.
The ensuing years of litigation blighted Whitney’s life, although Catherine Greene suffered the most financially.
bz13 At the very least, however, the episode suggests the need for cautious skepticism in evaluating controversial episodes in Whitney’s later career.