As soon as the partnership of Miller & Whitney was formed, the latter went to Connecticut to perfect the machine, obtain the patent, and manufacture for Georgia as many machines as he thought would supply the demand. At once there began between Whitney in Connecticut and Miller in Georgia a correspondence relative to the cotton-gin, which gives a complete history of the extraordinary efforts made by the two partners and the disappointments that fell to their lot. The very first letter, written three days after Whitney left, announces that encroachments upon their rights had already begun. "It will be necessary," says 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." At the close of the year 1793 Whitney was to return to Georgia with his gins, where his partner had made arrangements for beginning business. The importunity of Miller's letters, written during this period, urging him to come on, show how eager the Georgia planters were to enter the new field of enterprise that the genius of Whitney had opened to them. Nor did they at first contemplate stealing the invention. But the minds of even the more honorable among the planters were afterward deluded by various artifices set on foot by designing rivals of Whitney with a view to robbing him of his rights. One of the greatest difficulties experienced by the partners was the extreme scarcity of money, which embarrassed them so much as to make it impossible to construct machines fast enough. In April Whitney returned to Georgia. Large crops of cotton had been planted, the profits of which were to depend almost wholly on the success of the gin. A formidable competitor, the roller-gin, had also appeared, which destroyed the seed by means of rollers, crushing them between revolving cylinders instead of disengaging them by means of teeth. The fragments of seeds which remained in the cotton made it much inferior to Whitney's gin, and it was slower in operation. A still more dangerous rival appeared in 1795, under the name of the saw-gin. It was really Whitney's invention, except that the teeth were cut in circular rings of iron instead of being made of wire, as in the earlier forms of the Whitney gin. The use of such teeth had occurred to Whitney, as he established by legal proof. They would have been of no use except in connection with other parts of his machine, and it was a palpable attempt to invade his patent right. It was chiefly in reference to this device that the endless lawsuits that wore the life out of the partners were afterward held.