On March 14, 1794, Whitney received a patent on his gin. Phineas Miller, who had become the husband of Mrs. Greene, entered into a partnership with Whitney for managing the new invention. Whitney was to manufacture the gins in the North and Miller was to furnish the capital and attend to the interests of the business in the South. They planned not to sell machines or patent rights, but to make and own the gins, loaning them to planters for a rental of one pound in every three pounds of cotton ginned. They would have been wiser if they had manufactured and sold the machines outright. In the first place, it required a larger capital than the firm had to manufacture the necessary number of machines. In the second place, no one firm could make gins fast enough to supply the rapidly increasing demand, and consequently great encouragement was given to infringements on the patent rights. Unending troubles beset the new firm. Whitney himself was a victim to severe illness in the winter of 1794. Scarlet fever raged that year in New Haven, Connecticut, where the manufacturing was being done, and many of the workmen in the gin factory were unable to work. In 1795 Whitney was again seized with severe sickness, and to add to the vexations of the business, the books, papers, and machinery were destroyed by fire. Besides all this, rival claimants circulated a report that Whitney's gin ruined the fiber of the cotton, and that for this reason cotton ginned by the patent process was discriminated against in the markets of England. Another gin which did its work by crushing the seeds between rollers and leaving the crushed seeds in the fiber was represented as superior to Whitney's machine. [Illustration: ELI WHITNEY]