"Want to see something special?" asked Mose Harley. He was a new boy in the neighborhood whom Eli had just met at the husking bee. He pulled an object from his pocket.

  With a flick of his finger Mose flipped out a large sharp blade. Eli stared. It was a Barlow jackknife! He had never seen one before. He examined it closely. He flipped the blade shut; he flipped it open again. He tested the cutting edges. They were ground to a sharpness he had never thought possible. How he wished he had one!

  Already, with a much smaller knife, Eli had made many kitchen utensils for his mother, whistles and water wheels for himself. But with a jackknife there would be no limit to the things he could whittle! And it was a wonderful day for Eli when his old friend the Indian peddler suggested the way he could earn a jackknife of his own.

  Eli liked nothing better than working with his hands. Whenever he had a free moment from his chores—for Mr. Whitney was a thrifty Massachusetts farmer and kept his sons busy—Eli could usually be found in his father's shop. It was an unusual workshop for a Colonial farmer of the 1770's. Mr. Whitney liked tools and had almost every kind that was made. He rarely needed to go to the blacksmith, the cooper, the wheelwright, the dish turner in town. He let Eli try his hand at the work too.

  Eli's whittling, as Daniel Webster said later, was 'his alphabet of mechanics." As he grew older he learned to work just as skillfully with metal. Nothing seemed too complicated for the little Yankee boy to repair or copy. He made nails and hatpins and umbrellas and violins, repaired watches, turned out spindles and spokes and spoons. People in Worcester County said admiringly, "Eli Whitney can make or mend anything."

  They said the same thing when Eli helped the blacksmiths during the Revolution, when he was a student at Yale, when he went to Georgia and invented the answer to the South's problem of manufacturing cotton cloth. Massachusetts farmers had feared a good mechanic would be lost to the world when Eli went to college, but Yale made only a better mechanic of him. His cotton engine, nicknamed the "gin," made him famous, and when Eli came home to New England he added to his fame by inventing other useful objects and ways of assembling instruments and machines. The whittling Yankee boy became one of the first great American inventors, and his achievement changed the course of American history.

  Boys especially will find this story of Eli Whitney's busy boyhood and great accomplishment full of interest and entertainment, for Eli is a boy's boy, with his love of working with his hands, tinkering with tools.

From the dust jacket