Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney grew up on a farm in Massachusetts, where as a boy he made nails in his father's workshop to sell. He worked his way through Yale College and then went south to Georgia, planning to work as a tutor. Staying on the plantation of Catherine Greene, widow of the Revolutionary general Nathanael Greene, he learned how slow it was to pull the sticky seeds from short-staple cotton by hand. In 1793 he built the cotton gin, a machine using a cylinder of wire teeth to pull cotton fibers through a grate that the seeds could not pass. One worker with a gin could clean many times more cotton than by hand. The invention was easily copied, and Whitney spent years in lawsuits defending his patent and made little from it. The gin made cotton enormously profitable and greatly increased the demand for enslaved labor in the South. Whitney later made muskets for the U.S. government at a factory near New Haven, promoting the idea of standardized, interchangeable parts. He died in 1825.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia