ity of fiber likely to be offered. And when, in 1787, Edmund
Cartwright, clergyman and poet, invented the self-acting loom to which
power might be applied, the series was complete. These inventions,
supplementing the steam engine of James Watt, made the Industrial
Revolution. They destroyed the system of cottage manufactures in England
and gave birth to the great textile establishments of today.

The mechanism for the production of cloth on a great scale was provided,
if only the raw material could be found.

The romance of cotton begins on a New England farm. It was on a farm in
the town (township) of Westboro, in Worcester County, Massachusetts, in
the year 1765, that Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, was born.
Eli's father was a man of substance and standing in the community,
a mechanic as well as a farmer, who occupied his leisure in making
articles for his neighbors. We are told that young Eli displayed a
passion for tools almost as soon as he could walk, that he made a violin
at the age of twelve and about the same time took his father's watch
to pieces surreptitiously and succeeded in putting it together again so
successfully as to escape detection. He was able to make a table knife
to match the others of a broken set. As a boy of fifteen or sixteen,
during the War of Independence, he was supplying the neighborhood with
hand-made nails and various other articles. Though he had not been a
particularly apt pupil in the schools, he conceived the ambition of
attending college; and so, after teaching several winters in rural
schools, he went to Yale. He appears to have paid his own way through
college by the exercise of his mechanical talents. He is said to have
mended for the college some imported apparatus which otherwise would
have had to go to the old country for repairs. "There was a good
mechanic spoiled when you came to college," he was told by a carpenter
in the town. There was no "Sheff" at Yale in those days to give young
men like Whitney scientific instruction; so, defying the bent of his
abilities, Eli went on with his academic studies, graduated in 1792,
at the age of twenty-seven, and decided to be a teacher or perhaps a
lawyer.

Like so many young New Englanders of the time, Whitney sought employment
in the South. Having received the promise of a position in South
Carolina, he embarked at New York, soon after his graduation, on a
sailing vessel bound for Savannah. On board he met the widow of G