A small plaque now sits in front of a classic white farmhouse in a quiet residential neighborhood on Eli ... gin was officially created, which made harvesting cotton easier and much faster ...

the cotton gin. "He was such an inventive child, he took his dad's watch apart and put it back together, he drew nails into long hat pins, he was always inventing practical household items," said ...

In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin; 1822, Jeremiah Bailey invented a horse-drawn hay-cutting machine; 1827, Hiram and John Pitts made their mark with an endless-apron threshing machine ...

It was near the turn of the century in 1793 when Massachusetts-born Eli Whitney invented the cotton engine, the machine that automated the painstaking task of removing the seeds from raw cotton by ...