Engineer Eli Whitney died 35 years before the Civil War, but his most famous invention, the cotton gin, set the economic stage for war. Whitney's gin made cotton production far more efficient ...

He worked to produce and sell muskets for the rest of his life. Whitney died in January of 1825 in New Haven, Connecticut. Today, in nearby Hamden, there’s an Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop ...

On June 20, 1793, Eli Whitney, who had graduated from Yale the previous year, wrote to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, requesting a patent for his new invention, the cotton gin. The gin ...