The pay offered was too great to refuse so Whitney chose to accept and ventured outside the North for the first time in his life. On the voyage from New York to Savannah, he befriended Catherine Greene, the widow of Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene. Also on the trip was Phineas Miller, a Yale alumnus who was soon to marry Mrs. Greene (Wilson 79). Whitney had planned to travel to South Carolina after arriving in Savannah but he soon learned that the tutoring job only paid fifty guineas. This caused him to stay in Savannah with Greene and Miller on the plantation that they owned (Wilson 80). While on the plantation, Whitney soon learned of the workers' plight.
Eli Whitney wrote a letter to his father during his stay on the Savannah plantation and included this:.
heard much said of the extreme difficulty of ginning Cotton, that is, separating it from its seeds. There were a number of very respectable Gentlemen at Mrs. Greene's who all agreed that if a machine could be invented which would clean the cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both to the Country and to the inventor. Involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a Machine in my mind (Britton 13). .
With the current method of cleaning cotton, there involved too much hand labor. It took ten hours to clean three pounds of seed from the short-staple cotton fiber (Wilson 80). This labor-intensive and time-consuming process made growing and harvesting cotton uneconomical. Eli Whitney began working on a design immediately and studied the way that cotton was separated by hand. One hand held the seeds while the other pulled the strands of lint. His machine duplicated this theory (Wilson 80). Whitney built a crude prototype after only ten days (Britton 13). An offer of one hundred guineas was made to him for the invention, but he refused to sell. Whitney bought materials in Savannah and secretly worked in a basement from November, 1792, to April, 1793 (Britton 13).
