This Day in History: Eli Whitney was granted a patent for the cotton gin on this day in 1794. A cotton gin – meaning "cotton engine" – is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.
The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine has an interesting story about the cotton gin and Eli Whitney: "the cotton gin was enormously valuable in the South of the United States, where it made Southern cotton a profitable crop for the first time...Eli Whitney also had a business partner, Phineas Miller, and the two opted for a monopolistic pricing scheme...They would install their machines throughout Georgia and the South and charge farmers a fee to do the ginning for them. Their charge was two-fifths of the profit, paid to them in cotton. Not surprisingly, farmers did not like this pricing scheme very much and started to 'pirate' the machine. Whitney and Miller spent a lot of time and money trying to enforce their patent on the cotton gin, but with little success. Between 1794 and 1807, they went around the South bringing to court everyone in sight, yet received little compensation for their strenuous efforts. In the meanwhile, and thanks also to all that 'pirating', the Southern cotton-growing and cotton-ginning sector grew at a healthy pace."
Eli Whitney did eventually become wealthy with muskets without enforcing copyright.
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