This comprised a box with a slatted side against which a wooden cylinder studded with wire points was made to play.  When seed cotton was fed into the box and the cylinder was revolved, the sharp wires passing between the slats would engage the lint and pull it through as they passed out in the further revolution of the cylinder.  The seed, which were too large to pass through the grating, would stay within the hopper until virtually all the wool was torn off, whereupon they would fall through a crevice on the further side.  The minor problem which now remained of freeing the cylinder’s teeth from their congestion of lint found a solution in Mrs. Greene’s stroke with a hearth-broom.  Whitney, seizing the principle, equipped his machine with a second cylinder studded with brushes, set parallel to the first but revolving in an opposite direction and at a greater speed.  This would sweep the teeth clean as fast as they emerged lint-laden from the hopper.  Thus was the famous cotton-gin devised.[14]

[Footnote 12:  Letter of Phineas Miller to the Comptroller of South Carolina, in the American Historical Review, III, 115.]

[Footnote 13:  M.B.  Hammond, The Cotton Industry (New York, 1807), p. 23.]

[Footnote 14:  Denison Olmstead, Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq. (New Haven, 1846), reprinted in J.A.  Turner, ed., Cotton Planter’s Manual, pp. 297-320.  M.B.  Hammond, The Cotton Industry, pp. 25, 26.]

Miller, who now married Mrs. Greene, promptly entered into partnership with Whitney not only to manufacture gins but also to monopolize the business of operating them, charging one-third of the cotton as toll.  They even ventured into the buying and selling of the staple on a large scale.  Miller wrote Whitney in 1797, for example, that he was trying to raise money for the purchase of thirty or forty thousand pounds of seed cotton at the prevailing price of three cents, and was projecting a trade in the lint to far-off Tennessee.[15] By this time the partners had as many as thirty gins in operation at various points in Georgia; but misfortune had already begun to pursue them.  Their shop on the Greene plantation had been forced by a mob even before their patent was procured in 1793, and Jesse Bull, Charles M. Lin and Edward Lyons, collaborating near Wrightsboro, soon put forth an improved gin in which saw-toothed iron discs replaced the wire points of the Whitney model.[16] Whitney had now returned to New Haven to establish a gin factory, and Miller wrote him in 1794 urging prompt shipments and saying:  “The people of the country are running mad for them, and much can be said to justify their importunity.  When the present crop is harvested there will be a real property of at least fifty thousand dollars lying useless unless we can enable the holders to bring it to market,” But an epidemic prostrated Whitney’s workmen that year, and a fire destroyed his factory in 1795.  Meanwhile rival machines were appearing in the market,