Eli Whitney - The really famous one

From Wikipedia:
"Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor best known as the inventor of the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the industrial revolution and shaped the economy of the antebellum South.[1] Whitney's invention made short staple cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost his profits in legal battles over patent infringement, closed his business, and nearly filed bankruptcy."
Poor Eli Whitney, the man who brought us guns with interchangeable parts, and made cotton into a cash crop was plagued by misfortune throughout his life (his lab was broken into and people copied his gin design, and one of his factories burnt down putting him in serious financial trouble). Then again, the whole facilitating large-scale commercial cotton kind of lead to slavery being viable. He also had shifty sweetheart weapons  contracts thanks to his Yale connections.  There is even evidence that his attempts to build a cotton gin were unsuccessful, and that his design flaws were solved by a woman named Katherine Green (source).

The Eli Whitney Project

Recently I came across a post on Reddit.com where someone named KarmaAunt (not to be confused with Karmanaut) wrote how he or she was excited by the fact that the person who replaced Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank was a person named Eli Whitney Debevoise II, due to the fact that Eli Whitney was such a common answer so exams during his or her youth. After posting a comment pretending to be the person in question, I realized that discovering novel people named Eli Whitney is an endeavor one can be proud of. Thus the Eli Whitney Project was born.  Every so often I will bring to your awareness a notable person who shares the Eli Whitney namesake. Surely there are other great people living in the shadow of the Cotton Gin King who deserve recognition for their own exciting accomplishments.