Name____________________________________________________________________________
The Inventor Eli Whitney
Per.______
Define the following words using a dictionary as well as contextual clues from
the Eli Whitney packet:
Manumission (manumit)-
Cataclysmic-
Precocious-
Sieve-
Pirated (piracy)-
Qualm-
Repudiated-
Holocaust-
Royalty-
Use the Eli Whitney article to answer the following questions:
1.
Why was slavery a declining institution by 1790 (2 reasons)?
2.
How did Jefferson and Washington view slavery?
3.
How long did it take for Whitney to cause a revolution in the south? Why was Whitney’s
invention referred to as an avalanche?
4.
Why did Whitney’s parents object to him attending Yale University? What did he end up
doing at Yale?
5.
When Whitney first visited the south how long was it said to take to clean one point of lint
from three pounds of the green seed cotton?
6.
How did Whitney come up with his idea for building the Cotton Gin?
7.
How much work could Whitney’s invention do when he gave his first demonstration of how
the machine worked?
8.
What did planters do after witnessing his invention?
9.
Did planters wait for Whitney to return with a patent for his machine? Why?
10. What was Whitney and Millers original plan for how to sell their Cotton Gin idea? How much
would this plan have earned them?
11. After all was said and done how much money did Whitney make on his invention? Why was
he still left broke?
12. After his bitter disappointment in the south what would he do to change the face of the
economy in the north?