Eli Whitney was born on December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Province of Massachusetts Bay. Whitney was the son of a farmer and was a talented mechanic and inventor from an early age. As a child, he built a nail forge and a violin, among other things. After graduating from Yale College in 1792, he hoped to study to become a lawyer, but needed money. Instead, he took a job as a private tutor on the Georgia plantation of Catherine Greene (widow of Revolutionary General Nathanael Greene). Living on the farm, Whitney quickly learned of the struggle of Southern planters. Many were growing short-staple cotton, a variety that was time-consuming to clean by hand. At that time, the average cotton picker could de-seed about a pound of cotton per day. Greene and her plantation manager Phineas Miller encouraged Whitney to devise a machine to improve the process. He believed that creating such an invention could be quite lucrative, so he set his plans to become a lawyer aside and spent several months designing and building his cotton gin (“gin” being taken from “engine”).