on it. Now, said he, if I should make a wheel, and
cover it with short steel teeth, shaped like hooks, those teeth would
pull the cotton wool through the wires better than my fingers do,
and very much faster.

[Illustration: WHITNEY'S FIRST CONTRIVANCE FOR PULLING OFF THE
COTTON SEEDS.]

He made such a wheel; it was turned by a crank; it did the work
perfectly; so, in the year 1793, he had invented the machine the
planters wanted.

Before that time it used to take one negro all day to clean a single
pound of cotton of its seeds by picking them off one by one; now,
Eli Whitney's cotton-gin,[5] as he called his machine, would clean
a thousand pounds in a day.

[Footnote 5: Gin: a shortened form of the word _engine_, meaning any
kind of a machine.]

181. Price of common cotton cloth to-day; what makes it so cheap;
"King Cotton."--To-day nothing is much cheaper than common cotton
cloth. You can buy it for ten or twelve cents a yard, but before
Whitney invented his cotton-gin it sold for a dollar and a half a
yard. A hundred years ago the planters at the south raised very little
cotton, for few people could afford to wear it; but after this
wonderful machine was made, the planters kept making their fields
bigger and bigger. At last they raised so much more of this plant
than of anything else, that they said, "Cotton is king." It was Eli
Whitney who built the throne for that king; and although he did not
make a fortune by his machine, yet he received a good deal of money
for the use of it in some of the southern states.

[Illustration: CARRYING COTTON TO THE COTTON-GIN.]

Later, Mr. Whitney built a gun-factory near New Haven, Connecticut,
at a place now called Whitneyville; at that factory he made thousands
of the muskets which we used in our second war with England in 1812.

[Illustration: THE "STAR SPANGLED BANNER."[6]]

[Footnote 6: In the war of 1812 the British war-ships attacked Fort
McHenry, one of the defences of Baltimore. Francis Scott Key, a
native of Maryland, who was then detained on board a British
man-of-war, anxiously watched the battle during the night; before
dawn the firing ceased. Key had no means of telling whether the
British had taken the fort until the sun rose; then, to his joy, he
saw the American flag still floating triumphantly above the
fort--that meant that the British had failed in their attack, and
Key, in his delight, hastily wrote the song of the _Star Spangled
Banner_ on the b