Under the second Patent Act came the most important invention yet
offered, an invention which was to affect generations then
unborn. This was a machine for cleaning cotton and it was offered
by a young Yankee schoolmaster, temporarily sojourning in the
South.
CHAPTER II. ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON GIN
The cotton industry is one of the most ancient. One or more of
the many species of the cotton plant is indigenous to four
continents, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the manufacture
of the fiber into yarn and cloth seems to have developed
independently in each of them. We find mention of cotton in India
fifteen hundred years before Christ. The East Indians, with only
the crudest machinery, spun yarn and wove cloth as diaphanous as
the best appliances of the present day have been able to produce.
Alexander the Great introduced the "vegetable wool" into Europe.
The fable of the "vegetable lamb of Tartary" persisted almost
down to modern times. The Moors cultivated cotton in Spain on an
extensive scale, but after their expulsion the industry
languished. The East India Company imported cotton fabrics into
England early in the seventeenth century, and these fabrics made
their way in spite of the bitter opposition of the woolen
interests, which were at times strong enough to have the use of
cotton cloth prohibited by law.
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