At that time the planters set the negroes to do this. When they had finished their day's labor of gathering the cotton in the cotton field, the men, women, and children would sit down and pick off the seeds, which stick so tight that getting them off is no easy task. [Illustration: NEGROES GATHERING COTTON IN THE FIELD.] After the planters had talked awhile about this work, Mrs. Greene said, "If you want a machine to do it, you should apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney; he can make anything." "But," said Mr. Whitney, "I have never seen a cotton plant or a cotton seed in my life"; for it was not the time of year then to see it growing in the fields. 180. Whitney gets some cotton wool; he invents the cotton-gin; what that machine did.--After the planters had gone, Eli Whitney went to Savannah and hunted about until he found, in some store or warehouse, a little cotton wool with the seeds left on it. He took this back with him and set to work to make a machine which would strip off the seeds. He said to himself, If I fasten some upright pieces of wire in a board, and have the wires set very close together, like the teeth of a comb, and then pull the cotton wool through the wires with my fingers, the seeds, being too large to come through, will be torn off and left behind. He tried it, and found that the cotton wool came through without any seeds on it. Now, said he, if I should make a wheel, and cover it with short steel teeth, shaped like hooks, those teeth would pull the cotton wool through the wires better than my fingers do, and very much faster. [Illustration: WHITNEY'S FIRST CONTRIVANCE FOR PULLING OFF THE COTTON SEEDS.] He made such a wheel; it was turned by a crank; it did the work perfectly; so, in the year 1793, he had invented the machine the planters wanted. Before that time it used to take one negro all day to clean a single pound of cotton of its seeds by picking them off one by one; now, Eli Whitney's cotton-gin,[5] as he called his machine, would clean a thousand pounds in a day. [Footnote 5: Gin: a shortened form of the word _engine_, meaning any kind of a machine.] 181. Price of common cotton cloth to-day; what makes it so cheap; "King Cotton."--To-day nothing is much cheaper than common cotton cloth. You can buy it for ten or twelve cents a yard, but before Whitney invented his cotton-gin it sold for a dollar and a half a yard. A hundred years ago the planters at the south raised very little cotton, for few people could afford to wear it; but after this wonderful machine was made, the planters kept making their fields bigger and bigger. At last they raised so much more of this plant than of anything else, that they said, "Cotton is king." It was Eli Whitney who built the throne for that king; and although he did not make a fortune by his machine, yet he received a good deal of money for the use of it in some of the southern states. [Illustration: CARRYING COTTON TO THE COTTON-GIN.]