Seventy years ago, in a country village of Massachusetts, the "meeting-house" bell was ringing on a Sunday morning; and grave-faced farmers, with their matronly wives and healthy children, were assembling for "meeting." Out from a plain parallelopiped of a house, before which stood a few stiff trees, came a family, dressed in their best suits in honor of the day, and proceeded with reverent steps to the house of God. The father did not, as was his custom, stop to fasten the front door of the house, through which they had issued; for one of his children, a boy of twelve, had complained of illness that morning, and had been left at home. One, however, who could have looked into the front room of that house, where sat the boy, would have seen the symptoms of illness disappearing fast, as the sound of the retreating footsteps of the family came less and less distinctly on his ear. Carefully watching from the window, he sees the last of the party pass from his sight; and then, with his face red with excitement. and the consciousness of trespassing on forbidden grounds, he steals on tiptoe into the adjoining room. There hangs the object of his curiosity, to examine which he has feigned illness-his father's watch-a stout, old, silver timepiece, whose constant, careless tickings have long bewitched the boy's brain with the desire to understand their seeret. The old watch seems to tick louder as the little fellow approaches it. He takes it down hastily from the nail where it hangs, opens it and peers in among the wheels which he has so longed to see. His eye, though unpracticed, understands at a glance how cog moves cog and wheel turns wheel, from the barrel to the scapement, which now drops off the seconds less loudly as he holds the watch in his hand. But this is not enough: he must look more closely. He takes a little knife from his pocket, and handling it with the skill of an old workman, soon has the watch in pieces. All its delicate parts are lying before him, and VOL. 1.

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the watch ticks no longer. Till this moment, in the eagerness of his curiosity, he has thought of nothing but the curious machine before him; but now, in the stillness of the room, the recollection of his stern father comes over his mind, and he almost shudders to think what he has done. "Meeting" must be half over; and, if he would escape detection, the watch must be put together unin jured before the family return. There is no time to be lost. Skilfully his little fingers arrange the intricate machinery, and put wheel after wheel into its place. But it is slow and nice work, especially for a boy's clumsy hands; and before it is done the sunshine in the room tells that the hour of noon has nearly arrived, and that the long sermon must be nearly finished. At last, however, the task is completed, just as the boy sees the foremost of the returning congregation; and with the joy of escaping detection, and the greater joy of understanding the machinery, he hangs the watch up in its place; and returning to the other room, takes his seat to await the arrival of the family, with his hands full of the Bible and his head full of cog-wheels.

It would have been a stern father indeed who would not have forgiven the audacity for the sake of the skill; but the offence was never known until the boy told of it many years afterwards; and the old watch, ticking on unharmed, bore testimony to the mechanical genius of young Eli Whitney.

Whitney was born at Westborough, Massachusetts, December 8, 1765. The anecdote just related of him shows at what an early age his taste for mechanical pursuits and his skill in the use of tools developed themselves. When he was fifteen or sixteen years old he sought and obtained permission of his father to set up the manufacture of nails, which at that time bore a high price. At this employment he worked industriously during all his leisure time, until the close of the revolutionary war rendered it no longer profitable. He then turned his attention to the making of a kind of long pins which were then used by ladies for fastening their bonnets on; and in this he was so successful as nearly to monopolize the business.

When he was about nineteen years old, he became desirous of obtaining a collegiate education; but various obstacles prevented him from gratifying this desire until he was twenty-three. By that time he had acquired sufficient means and learning to enable him to enter the Freshmen Class in Yale College, which he did in May, 1789.

After he graduated, in the autumn of 1792, he agreed with a gentleman of Georgia to enter his family as a private teacher, and proceeded to that state to fulfill this agreement. On his arrival, however, he learned that his place had been filled by another; and he found himself far from home, without resources and almost without friends. In this situation, the family of General Greene, of Mulberry Grove, near Savannah, with whom he had accidentally formed an acquaintance, treated him with a kindness which

does them honor, and welcomed him under their roof to pursue the study of law.

Mr. Whitney had not been long a member of this family, when an incident occurred which changed the direction of his studies and pursuits. A party of gentleman from Augusta and its vicinity came to visit the family. In their conversation they spoke of the state of agriculture in that part of the country, and of the languishing condition of the interior of the southern states. Many of the inhabitants were then emigrating for want of some object on which to employ their industry. It was remarked that the green seed cotton, (a species more productive than the black,) might be cultivated on lands unsuitable for rice, were it not that the strong adherence of the fibre to the seed rendered the task of cleaning it so difficult. It was a day's work for a woman to separate a pound of clean staple from the seed; and unless some machine could be devised, better and more effective than any then in use, for this purpose, it was acknowledged by all that the cultivation of this kind of cotton could not be profitable. While they were thus conversing, Mrs. Greene mentioned young Whitney, rather, it would seem, for the purpose of bringing her young friend, and the mechanical genius, which she had seen that he possessed, into the favorable notice of her influential friends, than in the expectation that he could really contrive so desirable a machine; and remarked to the gentlemen that they should apply to him, for he could make anything. With the same kind motive she introduced him to them, and showed them several little specimens of his skill, such as a tambour frame and childrens' toys, in making which he had relieved the tediousness of law studies.

This conversation probably passed from the minds of the rest of those who were present, but it made a strong impression on Whitney. He had never seen cotton nor cotton seed; and it was not the season in which the cotton could be easily found in its natural state. But his mind was intent on this subject; and, with the perseverance characteristic of him, he went to Savannah and searched through the boats and warehouses until he found a small parcel of "cotton in the seed." Returning home with this, he communicated his plans to Mrs. Greene and Mr. Miller, her future husband. They encouraged him; and he set himself at work in a basement room of the house, to which he admitted no one but them. There he worked day after day with such rude materials as he could obtain, making the tools which he needed, and even drawing the wire for his machine. And while he was thus employed, thousands of acres in every southern state were waiting for the hour when his genius should cover them with the snowy crop of the cotton-tree; and many a planter was lamenting that there was no faster way of cleaning his "Georgia wool." Of those who knew Mr. Whitney, some laughed and wondered at his constant industry in that mysterious basement room; and others probably sneered, and asked if he had forsaken the law to make tambour frames and toys for

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children. But the same fingers which sixteen years before put watch together, kept busily at work, and with the same success. By spring the COTTON-GIN was completed, and a number of gentlemen invited from different parts of Georgia had seen its successful operation with wonder and delight.

The knowledge of this invention spread rapidly through the state. Multitudes came to see the machine; and when the sight was refused them, lest the invention should be pirated, the populace broke open the building and carried the machine away. Thus before a patent could be obtained, several gins were in operation, in fraud of Mr. Whitney's rights. This was the beginning of a series of infringements on the invention as patented, which the law was powerless to control, and which were a constant vexation to the owners of the patent.

Mr. Phineas Miller, whose name has been mentioned above, was a native of Connecticut, and a graduate of Yale College, who had come to Georgia as a private teacher in the family of General Greene. After General Greene's death, Mr. Miller became the husband of Mrs. Greene. He encouraged Whitney in all this undertaking, and at last, in May, 1793, entered into an agreement with him to bear the whole expense of maturing the invention, and to share the profits equally. Accordingly Miller and Whitney immediately commenced the manufacture of the machines.

The prospects of Mr. Whitney and his partner, Mr. Miller, were at this time most brilliant. They were the owners of an invention whose value was incalculable to the south. Everywhere the planters were resorting to the cultivation of cotton, and the necessary consequence of this was a constant and increasing demand for the gins. The gins alone could make the cotton crop valuable, and the people were (as Mr. Miller writes,) "almost running mad for them." Who can estimate the profits which the patentees might reasonably have expected from these machines? But they met disappointment after disappointment. A fire consumed their shop at New Haven, with all their machines and papers, and left Whitney in debt four thousand dollars. Rival gins, with slight variations, sufficient, as was hoped, to avoid the patent, were set up; and, to crown all, the English manufacturers declared the staple to be injured by the machines. Even Mr. Whitney's persevering and firm mind was shaken. In October, 1797, he writes, "I have labored hard against the strong current of disappointment, which has been threatening to carry us down the cataract; but I have labored with a shattered oar, and struggled in vain, unless some speedy relief is obtained."

A more correct and favorable estimate, however, of the value of the machines began to be entertained; and cotton cleaned by Whitney's gin was preferred to all other. Still the encroachments on the patent took away its value. "Surreptitious gins," writes Mr. Miller, in 1799, "are erected in every part of the country; and the jurymen in Augusta have come to an understanding among

themselves that they will never give a cause in our favor, let the merits of the case be what they may." For this reason the patentees in a year or two afterwards sold their rights to the legislatures of several of the states, at a price which was considered by the patentees as far below the true value. But the last of these sales was yet being negociated, when the state of South Carolina, the first state which purchased, repudiated their contract, and sued for the refunding of what had been paid, alleging that Mr. Whitney was not the inventor of the gin. Tennessee soon after pursued the same course. An attempt was made in North Carolina also to repudiate the contract of that state, but it was unsuccessful; and the repudiation of South Carolina lasted only for a year. The feelings of Mr. Whitney, and the injustice of the repudiating states, may be seen by an extract from his remonstrance to the state of South Carolina: "The subscriber avers that he has manifested no other than a disposition to fulfil all the stipulations entered into with the state of South Carolina, with punctuality and good faith; and he begs leave to observe farther that to have industriously, laboriously and exclusively devoted many years of the prime of his life to the invention and the improvement of a machine from which the citi zens of South Carolina have already derived immense profitswhich is worth to them millions, and from which their posterity to the latest generations must continue to derive the most important benefits, and in return to be treated as a felon, a swindler and a villain, has stung him to the very soul."

In the state of Georgia every opposition was made to Mr. Whitney's claim. More than sixty suits had been commenced in that state before a single decision on the merits of his claim was obtained. Combinations and associations were formed to oppose him; and at one time few men in Georgia dared to come into court and testify in his favor. "In one instance," he writes, "I had great difficulty in proving that the machine had been used in Georgia, although at the same moment there were three separate sets of this machinery in motion within fifty yards of the building where the court sat, all so near that the rattling of the wheels was distinctly heard on the steps of the court-house." When at last, in 1807, the celebrated decision of Judge Johnson was obtained in his favor, the term of his patent had nearly expired; and even this decision did not stop infringements. Through all this course of opposition and persecution, Mr. Whitney persevered with coolness and firmness, though the contrivances against him seemed inexhaustible. "Even now, after thirty years," says a gentleman who knew him well, "my head aches to recollect his narratives of new trials, fresh disappointments and accumulated wrongs."

Becoming convinced that the profits to be received from cotton gins would never equal the expectations which, at the time of its invention seemed so reasonable, Mr. Whitney had turned his attention, some years before Judge Johnson's decision, to another pursuit; and in 1798 had entered into a contract with the United States for the manufacture of arms. His contract amounted to