Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney was a man who lived a long time ago (in the late 1700s and early 1800s) and he was really good at making things. One day, he was asked by a farmer to help clean up cotton because it was really hard work and took a long time. Eli Whitney came up with an idea to make a machine that would clean cotton much faster and more efficiently. He called his invention the cotton gin. The cotton gin had little spikes that grabbed onto the cotton and then pulled the cotton through a wire mesh that separated the seeds from the cotton fibers. This made it much easier and faster for people to clean cotton.

Before Eli Whitney made the cotton gin, it could take a whole day to clean just one pound of cotton! But with the cotton gin, one person could clean 50 pounds of cotton in just one day. This was a big deal because it meant that cotton became a lot cheaper to produce, which in turn made clothes cheaper to buy. The cotton gin changed the way people used cotton, and it made Eli Whitney very famous. His invention helped to fuel the growth of the textile industry in the southern United States and helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution, which was a time when machines were invented to make things faster, better and cheaper.