There followed very soon the first dramatic scenes in the long battle between the owners of the cotton-gin and the public. The Southern people knew how invaluable such an invention would be to them; it meant food and shelter and better living all along the line; it would increase the value of their property a hundredfold. So as soon as it became bruited abroad that Eli Whitney had such a machine in his workroom that spot became the Mecca for the countryside. Crowds came to beg for a look at the wonderful machine, and hung about the house and plotted to get in. But Whitney and Miller were afraid to let people see the invention until they had made sure of their patents on it, and so they refused to let the crowds have a look at it. Then the more reckless of the crowds threw all sense of fairness to the winds, and broke into Mr. Miller’s house, seized the machine, and carried it off with them. Soon it was publicly displayed, and before Whitney could finish his model for the Patent Office a dozen machines, similar to his, were in use in the cotton fields. Whitney’s cotton-gin was made of two cylinders of different diameters, mounted in a strong wooden frame. One cylinder had a number of small circular saws that were fitted into grooves cut into the cylinder. The other cylinder was covered with brushes, and so placed that the tips of the bristles of these brushes touched the saw-teeth. The raw cotton was put in a hopper, where it was met by the teeth of the saws, and torn from the seeds. The brushes then swept the cotton clear of the gin. The seeds were too large to go between the bars through which the series of saws protruded, and were kept apart by themselves. Of course many improvements were made upon this machine, but it was found that even in this original form it would enable one man, using two horse-power, to clean the seed from five thousand pounds of cotton in a day. That meant that fortunes could be made in the hitherto disregarded cotton fields of the South. Whitney now went to Connecticut to finish certain improvements on the machine, to secure his patents, and to begin the manufacturing of as many gins as his partner Miller should find were needed in Georgia. The partners’ wrote frequently to each other, and their letters show the fierceness of the struggle they were waging to protect their rights. “It will be necessary,” wrote Miller, “to have a considerable number of gins in readiness to send out as soon as the patent is obtained in order to satisfy the absolute demands and make people’s heads easy on the subject; for I am informed of two other claimants for the honor of the invention of the cotton-gin in addition to those we knew before.”