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