Whitney's Gin. In 1792 Catherine Greene, a widowed Georgia plantation owner, invited the Connecticut Yankee Eli Whitney to tutor her children on the family plantation outside Savannah. Conversations between cotton planters at the Greene estate often turned to the difficulty of supplying the British market for cotton, and Whitney came to realize that the major bottleneck in the expansion of cotton growing in the South was the difficulty of separating cotton seed from the cotton boll. Once Whitney understood the problem, it took him only a few weeks to devise a simple hand-cranked machine called a gin (short for engine) that utilized two metal rollers with mounted teeth to separate cotton seeds from their bolls. Whitney's device ginned short staple cotton eight times faster than traditional methods by 1800, and worked faster still after improvements in design and attachment to a power source other than manual...