Eli Whitney

Inventor of the cotton gin of 1793, devised within months of arriving in Georgia as a young Yale graduate. The gin made him famous and nearly nothing else did him any good: patent piracy consumed the profits, and he turned to musket contracts and the pursuit of interchangeable parts. His machine's agricultural legacy, a cotton South and the expansion of slavery, outweighed his own fortunes entirely. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/