Ms.Greene's Plantation

In 1789, Eli was accepted into Yale where at first he struggled. He was finding difficulty in keeping up with sleep and school work, but he soon adjusted and excelled at college. While at Yale, he studied a variety of topics including Latin, math, and physics. Yale was essential in inspiring Eli to invent the cotton gin and also gave him a new, more thoughtful view on life. After college, he went to Georgia and became a tutor. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

He was going to go to law school but he was short on money so he went to a plantation owned by a woman named Mrs. Greene. While at Mrs. Greene’s plantation, he learned that most plantations could only produce a type of cotton called short staple, but short staple was hard to clean because it needed its seeds removed manually. It was while working as a tutor that he got the idea from enslaved workers taking a long time to pick the seeds out of the cotton fiber, and consequently he thought he could make something better to revolutionize the industry. This was the last major inspiration for his invention, and he was ultimately very successful in being helpful to plantation owners.  Normally, it took one slave ten hours to remove the seeds from a pound of cotton, but with the cotton gin, two slaves were able to remove seeds from 50 pounds in the same amount of time. This means that the cotton gin is twenty-five times faster than removing seeds by hand.