If you went to elementary school in the United States, you no doubt learned about Eli Whitney’s cotton gin as an example of how the industrial revolution took previously manual processes and ...

On June 20, 1793, Eli Whitney, who had graduated from Yale the previous year, wrote to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, requesting a patent for his new invention, the cotton gin. The gin ...

Engineer Eli Whitney died 35 years before the Civil War, but his most famous invention, the cotton gin, set the economic stage for war. Whitney's gin made cotton production far more efficient ...