Eli Whitney was an inventor best known for his invention of the cotton gin. But it was his ideas and methods that had the greatest impact on America, bringing the country into the Industrial Revolution. He grew up as a farmer s son, but was often found in his father s workshop. As a boy during the American Revolution, he started his first business as a supplier of nails. Against his family s wishes, he insisted on getting an education from Yale. It...

Profiles the life and achievements of the inventor whose creation of the cotton gin, as well as a machine that could mass-produce muskets, transformed the American economy and greatly influenced manufacturing.

In the 1600s, cotton and silk fabrics that bore colorful and exotic printed patterns, known as "calico," were flying off the shelves of the East India Company's stores. The rapidly escalating demand for calico had taken a visible toll on the European textile businesses. The trend spread across Europe and North America, and picking cotton was such an arduous task that even when relying almost entirely on slave labor, it was hard to make cotton a profitable...

A biography of the inventor of the cotton gin who also developed basic ideas of mass production in the manufacture of weapons and other machines.