Home > Industrial Revolution > Eli Whitney Biography

Born December 8, 1765

Westborough, Massachusetts

Died January 8, 1825

New Haven, Connecticut

American inventor

"He can make anything."

—Catherine Greene, recommending Eli Whitney to planters who needed a machine to comb seeds from cotton.

Eli Whitney is well known as the inventor of the cotton gin, a device that pulled cotton from the seed and influenced the course of American history in ways that are both obvious and subtle. The Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic change that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, could be said to have started influencing life in the United States in April 1793. It was in that month that Eli Whitney, a young graduate of Yale University, first demonstrated a machine for extracting the sticky, green seeds from bolls of cotton. It was a called a cotton gin...