Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, in 1765, and graduated from Yale in 1792. He went to Georgia as a teacher and found a patron in Mrs Nathaniel Greene, the widow of a general.
While staying on her cotton plantation he realised the need for a machine which would clean the cotton fibre that was being produced in ever greater quantities in the Southern states to feed Britain's rapidly expanding textile industry.
The job was difficult and it could take a worker a whole day to remove the seeds from one pound of cotton fibre.
Machinery had been used before: the Hindus and Chinese used something called a churka, while the Italians had a device called a manganello, but neither did the job satisfactorily.
Whitney produced the first crude model of his gin in 1793 - 'gin' is short for 'engine' - his patent application was filed in June of that year and by the following March it had been granted.
At a stroke, the gin cleared the bottleneck that had developed in cotton production - compared with the pound-a-day limit of the manual worker, the gin could churn out one-and-a-half TONS of cleaned cotton.
But success was just the start of Whitney's problems. Like Hargreaves's Spinning Jenny, the device was so simple that it could be copied easily by anyone with a few basic skills.
And with plantation owners unwilling to pay to use the real thing, Whitney was forced to spend all his profits on lawsuits. The litigation even cost him the $50,000 granted to him by the State of Georgia for his invention.
By 1797 he had been forced out of business and Congress refused to renew the patent when it expired in 1807. Like Crompton in England, Whitney came to the conclusion that an invention could be so valuable as to be worthless to its inventor.
Unlike Crompton, however, Whitney did not fade into obscurity. Instead, he became the father of US mass production, developing the concept of interchangeable parts.
Just a year after his gin business was closed down, he was given a contract by the US Government for the manufacture of muskets and proceeded to make a fortune. But he never again patented any of his inventions, which included a milling machine.
He died in January, 1825.
