t the essential requirements. 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 Ha