The invention of the cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was produced across the United States. Although at the time it was considered a brilliant invention, the company responsible for selling the cotton ginning service experienced significant financial difficulties over the years. The failure of Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller's cotton ginning business was the result of overextending obligations, patent infringement, and success beyond imagination. While machines designed to remove the seeds from long-staple cotton have been around for more than 1,500 years, Eli Whitney's company The Cotton Gin was the first to separate the seeds from the fibers of short-staple cotton. Eli Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts in 1765 and grew up with great mechanical skills. Growing up, young Eli Whitney built several things and even started a nail-making business during the American Revolution when he was just fourteen years old. After the war, the nail trade declined, so he and his assistant began making hat pins. He was able to adapt to market developments in his industry (Huff 12). As he grew older, he began teaching high school in 1783 until he began attending Yale College in 1789 (Carlson). Later in his career, he pioneered the use of interchangeable parts in firearms manufacturing. The government hired him to make 10,000 muskets in 1798, then another 15,000 muskets in 1812. Before the advent of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, plantations in the Antebellum South experimented with several crops to attempt to get rich, but nothing seemed to work. The climate was too hot for tobacco, but not hot enough for sugar cane (Huff 36). Both long-staple and short-staple cottons were experimented with, but they proved incapable of use in the middle of paper ......g the life they would have lived at home. The nation was soon divided between the rural farmers of the South and the urban industrial workers of the North. These cultural differences between the Northern and Southern United States would eventually lead to Civil War (Huff 64). Even though the cotton gin did not make Eli Whitney much money, he remained a successful inventor and manufacturer until he died in 1825 at the age of 59. The invention of the cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was produced in the Antebellum South and helped the New England textile industry flourish. Needless to say, the cotton gin was perhaps the most influential invention of the 19th century, making cotton the South's primary cash crop, requiring more slave labor on Southern plantations, and causing indirectly the American Civil War..