What was needed, as his southern friends pointed out to Whitney, was the invention of some apparatus for performing the work of separation cleanly and quickly. The problem was one that appealed to him with peculiar force. Even as a boy in Massachusetts he had been fond of tinkering with mechanical appliances. At the early age of twelve he had made a violin of fairly good tone; a year later he was making excellent knives; and before he was fifteen he was recognized as the best mechanic in his native town of Westborough. It was therefore with real enthusiasm that he set up a workshop in the basement of his Georgia home, and varied his law studies by experimenting in the manufacture of a cotton gin. Within a few months he had successfully completed his self-imposed task by the creation of a machine equipped with hundreds of tiny metal fingers, each of which did more work in quicker time than the human hand could possibly do. That same year (1793) fully five million pounds of cotton were harvested in the United States, the product of a planting stimulated solely by faith in the Whitney gin. By the year of Whitney’s death (1825) cotton was indisputably king in the commercial life of the nation, the value of the cotton exports for that year being more than $36,000,000, as against a valuation of barely $30,000,000 for all other American exports. The eventual abolition of slavery served only to accentuate the stupendous importance of the cotton gin. Under free labor the production of cotton has steadily risen, until nowadays it annually runs into the billions of pounds, with a valuation of many hundreds of millions of dollars, and affords employment not only to an enormous army of cultivators, but to a still greater army of workers in factory, office, and store. [Illustration: THE FULTON HOMESTEAD _The inventor purchased this farm in Washington County, Pennsylvania, when he was but twenty-one years of age. Here he left his mother when he went to England to study art._] Even of much greater importance have been the results of the labors of another illustrious American inventor, Robert Fulton. Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in November, 1765, Fulton, by reason of the astonishing number and variety of his inventions, may well be called the Edison of his time. ROBERT FULTON [Illustration: ROBERT FULTON _Fulton was tall, and his face showed great intelligence. He was refined, and possessed grace and elegance of manner._]