Provides digital resources and links to websites about Benjamin Banneker and his accomplishments.
Includes Banneker's Almanac with a drawing of him on the front as well as correspondence with Thomas Jefferson. Also includes a brief description of his accomplishments.
Edited
- Shows head-and-shoulders portrait of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap; inset image shows Jackie Robinson covering a slide at second base.
Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 - January 8, 1825)
Inventor
1793
Cotton Gin
Whitney saw that a machine to clean the green-seed cotton could make the South prosperous and make its inventor rich. He set to work and constructed a crude model. Whitney’s cotton gin had four parts: (1) a hopper to feed the cotton into the gin; (2) a revolving cylinder studded with hundreds of short wire hooks, closely set in ordered lines to match fine grooves cut in (3) a stationary breastwork that strained out the seed while the fibre flowed through; and (4) a clearer, which was a cylinder set with bristles, turning in the opposite direction, that brushed the cotton from the hooks and let it fly off by its own centrifugal force.
When Congress refused to renew the patent, which expired in 1807, Whitney concluded that “an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.” Indeed, Whitney’s invention made green-seed cotton a profitable cash crop throughout the South and was a key input in the perpetuation of slavery in the United States. He never patented his later inventions, one of which was a milling machine.
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