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Eli Whitney studied at Yale before going on to invent the cotton gin, a device that highly streamlined the process of extracting fiber from cotton seeds. With the patent for his device being widely pirated, Whitney struggled to earn any recompense for his invention. Eli Whitney was born on December 8, , in Westboro, Massachusetts.

He grew up on a farm, yet had an affinity for machine work and technology. As a youth during the Revolutionary War, he became an expert at making nails from a device of his own invention. In , Whitney started to attend Yale College and graduated in , with some deliberation about becoming a lawyer. Upon graduation, Whitney was hired to be a tutor in South Carolina.

On his way to his new position via boat, he met Catherine Greene, the widow of a Revolutionary War general. Greene soon learned of the lack of a money crop in the immediate area, with the market for tobacco declining. Though green-seed cotton was widely available, it took hours of manual labor to properly clean the seed and extract the fiber.

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Local planters took to the widespread planting of green-seed cotton, immediately straining existing modes of production. Whitney and Miller patented the gin in , with the aim of producing and installing gins throughout the South and charging farmers two-fifths of resulting profits. Their device was widely pirated, however, with farmers creating their own version of the gin.

Whitney spent years in legal battles and by the turn of the century agreed to license gins at an affordable rate. Southern planters were ultimately able to reap huge financial windfalls from the invention while Whitney made almost no net profit, even after he was able to receive monetary settlements from various states. By the mids, Southern cotton production had risen by a stratospheric amount from the previous century, with more than a million bales of cotton being produced by