Who did Whitney steal the idea of the Cotton Gin from?

We don’t do homework here, but who says he stole the idea? He figured it out.

Steal? Why do you think he stole the idea?

The REAL Whitney?

He stole it from two females. Their names were…....

Let me guess…8th grade?

The question is based on a dubious premise.

You won’t get an answer until you first establish that he stole it.

Go to the library!

Actually, there is a point here. People don’t invent things in a void. They first have experiences that cause them to say “Hmmmm.” Some of those experiences may be based on other inventions that others have come up with, and the made it do something different.

He stole it from a porn director. It was originally intended to be the centerpiece of “Two Girls, One Cotton Gin.”

OBSCENE AGAIN!

Why do you guys give young students such a hard time? If you are not going to answer on the basis of homework, can you at least be polite about it. All this does is chase people away from Fltuher.

The question got me wondering if there really is any reason to doubt that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. I found this, which shows how things can be more complicated than they first seem.

@LostInParadise Because the students need to think for themselves. We don’t do them any favors by handing them answers. Especially since it’s so easy now to find the answers on the net.

@LostInParadise Two reasons:

1. Asking other people instead of doing your own research = cheating.
2. Kids are already getting more and more dumb now, because of those stupid state tests that cause them to not learn real information in school, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to make things even easier on them.

Points taken but still no excuse for rudeness. You can say that it is the site’s policy not to answer homework questions, because it would be unfair to those who have to find the answer on their own. You could then suggest doing a Web search and offer help on how to do one. Why assume the worst? This is just some kid asking a question. Maybe he thinks that asking on Fluther is a way of doing research.

@Rockstar0224 got this far: _“He stole it from two females. Their names were…....” what are we supposed to do with that? I’d volunteer “Their names were Mom and Gramma.” But I would be wrong. Maybe. So how would I verify the comment? Google.

I’m wondering why we are so unwilling to help in such a belittling way.

Why would it be cheating? That’s nonsense… There is no difference between asking google or asking us. @Rockstar0224 is using Internet queries to look for an answer. Using fluther iso google at least allows us to learn something as well.

As a former teacher who taught kids how to do research papers, I implore folk not to just answer the question. The teacher doesn’t assign stuff because they just want the right answers. They are hoping the kids learn how to search for it themselves.

You can’t site fluther as a valid source anyway, so you’re not really helping the kids when you give the answer anyway. Pointing them to a valid website with the information would be much better. Even though I would still draw a heavy sigh, at least the kid found a valid website.

@keobooks
Of course you’re right in that sense… however, we should still just try to help these ‘kids’ as we would anybody else.

Why don’t people just say… look at wikipedia. Under the lemma for Cotton Gin, you’ll find Whitney mentioned. Then check out Whitney on wikipedia.. there you’ll see he took a vital improvement to his gin, from a suggestion made to him by a lady he corresponded with.

There is no reason to be nasty to kids using this forum looking for answers.

@whitenoise We had a HUGE problem with homework-askers on Answerbag. Kids would text in their questions from school just to get the answer on a test they were taking.

Eventually we caught on. From then on, most of the answers were “Romaine Lettuce”, no matter what the question.

I feel no urge to handhold kids who post their homework questions verbatim. 99% of the time, the questions are from a textbook page, with the answer staring at them plainly from the previous page. If they’re not willing to read a textbook chapter, why should I assume they’re going to read Wikipedia? And how can we also assume that the answer on Wikipedia is the same one they’re looking for, anyway?

Homework is binary – either the answer is the one your teacher is looking for, or it isn’t. If the teacher (who is overworked, underpaid, and probably not reading too thoroughly as she grades papers over her dinner while her kids are screaming for the attention she hardly has time to give them) doesn’t see the two or three buzzword’s she’s looking for, it’ll probably get marked incorrectly anyway.

@Seek_Kolinahr
Also true, @Seek_Kolinahr. Whatever way you look at it though… no reason to be nasty.
(Not saying you were, I don’t even know a single flutherer who gave me that feeling in particular. More our overall tone of voice.)

Kids are just looking for answers. That’s their nature. If a question is homework, why not just ignore it? Anyways… this is general and I’m a bit off-topic maybe.

At least this site has standards on what questions are appropriate. On Askville, I remember seeing questions where the number the teacher assigned to the question was still there. The worst ones were questions people cut and paste which were OPINION questions.

I still want to know why the OP thinks Whitney stole the idea? I’m not trying to be obnoxious. Did a teacher tell him to research who Whitney stole the idea from? That seems like an odd homework question. If it is homework I don’t think there is anything wrong with us helping guide the OP to where the answers might be. Here a link regarding some of the cotton gin controversy.

It wasn’t for homework! I was just wondering since we learned he stole the idea and I couldn’t find from who!!

Hi @Rockstar0224,

Did you find it in the meantime? Maybe have a look here. There seems to be a controversy around that still.

I believe he stole it from Romaine Lettuce.
Who told you he stole the idea?

@Rockstar0224

The details of the question say “for history”, and the topics are “education” “school” and “help”. Don’t lie to me. I don’t like it.