Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney posed for this portrait in the 1820s, when he had achieved prosperity and social standing as the inventor of the cotton gin and other machines. Whitney’s success prompted the artist — his young New Haven, Connecticut, neighbor Samuel F. B. Morse — to turn his creative energies from painting to industrial technology. By the 1840s, Morse had devised the hardware for the first successful commercial telegraph and the software — the “Morse Code” — that it transmitted.
Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY.