Eli Whitney

Source

• Born: 8 December 1765
• Birthplace: Westboro, Massachusetts
• Died: 8 January 1825
• Best Known As: Inventor of the cotton gin

Eli Whitney went down in history as the inventor of the cotton gin, a machine made to extract seeds from cotton, patented in 1794. Whitney spent a decade fighting patent infringements, and years of litigation left him nearly penniless by 1804. Whether he was the sole inventor of the gin is still a matter of debate, yet Whitney clearly had a knack for manufacturing and business: after the cotton gin he went into the firearms business, using his mechanical skills to design a system for manufacturing identical and interchangeable parts for rifles. He operated a successful firearms factory near New Haven, Connecticut until he retired around 1820.

For more information on Eli Whitney, visit Britannica.com.

An American inventor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whitney invented the cotton gin, a device for processing raw cotton.

In debt from futile litigation against piracy of his cotton‐gin patent, this Massachusetts‐born Yale alumnus (class of 1792) obtained a federal contract in 1798 to make 10,000 military muskets. Unhampered by gunsmithing experience, Whitney built a water‐powered factory in Hamden, Connecticut, where he devised production methods later adopted into “armory practice.” His initially unskilled workers used specialized jigs and fixtures to shape ostensibly uniform gun parts before fitting them together for shipment to the Springfield Armory.

Declining an offer in 1806 to head the Harpers Ferry Armory, Whitney continued to receive contract extensions despite production delays, for his persuasively expressed plan agreed with the desire of French‐influenced ordnance officers to standardize weapons. Meeting with Whitney in 1815, they established interchangeability of parts as the goal for military musket production. That required coordination of effort among Springfield, Harpers Ferry, and contractors by a system of inspection and production gauges, which did not operate effectively until the late 1840s. Despite Whitney's fame, his muskets, like others of his era, lacked interchangeable parts.

[See also Musket, Rifled.]

Bibliography

• Constance McLaughlin Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology, 1956.
• Merritt Roe Smith, Army Ordnance and the ‘American system’ of Manufacturing, 1815–1861, in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 1985

The American inventor and manufacturer Eli Whitney (1765-1825) perfected the cotton gin. He was a pioneer in the development of the American system of manufactures.

Eli Whitney was born in Westboro, Mass., on Dec. 8, 1765. He took an early interest in mechanical work. Although he worked on his father's farm, he preferred his father's shop, where, by the age of 15, he was engaged part-time in making nails for sale. He taught school to earn money to continue his education and graduated from Yale College in 1792.

It was Whitney's intention to study law, and he undertook to tutor children on a plantation near Savannah, Ga., to support himself. In Georgia he attracted a great deal of attention by inventing a number of domestic contrivances for his hostess. He was informed of the need for a machine to clean green-seed cotton. Cotton gins of various designs were then in use in different parts of the world, and models had been imported and tried in Louisiana as early as 1725. None had ever worked well, however, and when Whitney arrived in Georgia, cleaning was still a hand job. It took a slave a full day to clean one pound of cotton. Whitney set his hand to the problem and within ten days had produced a design for a gin. By April 1793 he had made one which cleaned 50 pounds a day.

Whitney went into partnership in May 1793 with Phineas Miller and returned to New England to build his gins. He received a patent for his machine in March 1794, by which time word of his design had spread and imitations were already on the market. It was the initial hope of Whitney and Miller to operate the gins themselves, thus cornering the cotton market, but a lack of capital and the large number of pirated machines made this impossible. Whitney took infringers to court, but he lost his first case, in 1797, and it was to be ten years before he won decisively and was able to establish his right to the machine.

During this decade of frustration and financial uncertainty, Whitney turned to the manufacture of small arms as a way of repairing his fortune and saving his reputation. He signed his first contract with the Federal government on June 14, 1798, and promised to deliver 4,000 arms by the end of September 1799 and another 6,000 a year later. Whitney had no factory and no workmen, knew nothing about making guns, and had thus far been unable even to manufacture in quantity the relatively simple cotton gins. The inducement for him was that the government agreed to advance him $5,000.

Judged by the terms of the contract, however, Whitney was a failure. He had no idea of how to go about fulfilling his obligation, and indeed he delivered his first 500 guns in 1801, three years late. The last guns were not delivered to the government until January 1809, almost nine years late. By this time the government had advanced him over $131,000. He died in New Haven, Conn., on Jan 8, 1825.

Whitney's claims of novel methods of production have led many scholars to assume that he had worked out and applied what came to be called the American system of manufactures. By this method, machines were substituted for hand labor, parts were made uniform, and production was speeded up. Thus it became possible to dispense with the skilled but expensive master craftsmen required previously.

This idea was not a new one. The Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem had used such a system in the 1720s, but no one had carried on his work. By 1799 the government armory at Springfield, Mass., had cut the number of man-days needed to make a musket from 21 to 9 through the use of machines.

The question thus becomes: where did Whitney fit into this growing concept of the American system? We know practically nothing of what went on within his armory. The records show that he tried to hire workmen away from the Springfield Armory to build machines for him. We know also that in a recent test of Whitney muskets not all their parts were in fact interchangeable and that some parts were not even approximately the same size. The answer then must be that Whitney was only one of a number of men who, about 1800, began to experiment with a relatively new and potentially revolutionary method of production - mass manufacture, by special-purpose machines, of products made up of uniform and interchangeable parts.

Further Reading

The basic biography is still Denison Olmsted, Memoir of Eli Whitney (1846). Two modern studies which tend perhaps to overemphasize Whitney's contributions to the development of American technology are Jeannette Mirsky and Allan Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney (1952), and Constance (McLaughlin) Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (1956).

(1765-1825), inventor and manufacturer. Whitney exhibited mechanical skills and an entrepreneurial spirit at an early age. He mastered the use of the tools in the workshop on his father's farm in Westborough, Massachusetts, became a general mechanical handyman in the area, and organized a successful nail-making business.

After graduating from Yale, he moved to Georgia where he had been hired as a tutor, but quickly found an opportunity that was more to his liking and promised great rewards. Learning that the tedious and time-consuming task of picking the seeds out of cotton lint blocked the commercial production of short-staple, green-seed cotton, he decided to create a machine that would do the job. He wrote to his father in September 1793 that in ten days he produced a prototype gin that allowed one man to do the work of fifty. He declined an offer of "a Hundred Guineas" for his invention and decided instead "to relinquish my school and turn my attention to perfecting the Machine." He quickly improved his model, secured a patent, and in 1794, with a partner supplying financial backing, began manufacturing his gin. "It is generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by it," he noted optimistically.

Almost overnight the gin made cotton production economically feasible, breathing new life into a languishing slave system by providing the South with a new commercial crop and the world with relatively cheap, high-quality cotton. But Whitney did not benefit financially from his revolutionary invention. Others had succeeded in producing similar gins at about the same time, and Whitney's device was simple and easy to copy. When he decided to charge royalties for use of his gin, rather than to sell it outright, cotton planters bought competing gins or unauthorized copies of Whitney's. Whitney went to court to protect his patent and even managed to win a patent infringement suit, but rivals continued to produce and sell their machines. The competition, the legal costs, and finally, his inability to get his patent renewed deprived Whitney of most of his anticipated profits.

In the meantime, however, Whitney found a new opportunity. In 1798, the federal government granted him a contract to produce ten thousand muskets using what he promised would be a new process to make the various parts of the weapons interchangeable. Once again Whitney's mechanical talents led him to a revolutionary innovation; the manufacture of products with interchangeable parts became a key element in modern industrial production.

Although the concept of interchangeable parts did not originate with Whitney and did not become widespread until the later development of the machine tool industry, Whitney's factory at Mill Rock, near New Haven, Connecticut, was one of the earliest to use the method successfully. Whitney designed and built the necessary machinery and trained workers to use it, tasks that took longer than he originally expected. But, in the end, he produced the weapons with interchangeable parts. This time Whitney benefited financially from his innovation. Additional contracts from the federal government and from several states provided new work and income for his arms factory.

Although he lived through massive political and economic changes in the nation, Whitney showed little interest in such matters, except on the few occasions when policies directly affected his business. He retained little of the religious puritanism of his upbringing and was unconcerned with the religious ferment in the nation during his adult life. He single-mindedly devoted himself to his business affairs and died a wealthy man. His successful firm passed to his son and then to his grandson and was eventually sold to the Winchester Arms Company.

Bibliography:

Constance McL. Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (1956); Jeanette Mirsky and Allan Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney (1952).

Author:

Harold D. Woodman

See also Cotton Gin; Industrial Revolution; Science and Technology.

The realization that Eli Whitney was among the most important Americans at the start of the republic has come only gradually to historians, even historians of technology. Today it is clear that his most famous invention, the cotton gin, saved the United States South economically while encouraging the slave and plantation systems that ultimately led to the Civil War. Yet it is likely that the gin, a simple device that Whitney made in a few days, would have been invented by someone else as well. Whitney's true worth came from the invention of the "American system" of manufacture and the creation of specialized tools. He also was the first American to utilize standardized parts, an idea probably originally owed to Leblanc, a French arms manufacturer. Whitney's development of cost accounting and establishment of stable government contracts originated methods still used for successful manufacture of all sorts.

Whitney showed inventiveness and intelligence from an early age, taking apart and reassembling his father's watch, for example. He used these skills to put himself through high school and Yale University. On graduation from Yale, deeply in debt (as circumstances were to keep him for most of his life), he had the pivotal encounter of his life. Taking a job as a tutor in far-off South Carolina, he arranged to travel with another young man, Phineas Miller, the manager of the considerable estate of the widow of General Nathanael Greene. All the evidence suggests that Whitney fell hopelessly in love with Catherine Greene, and remained so until her death. (Catherine, however, eventually married Miller.) At first, Whitney lingered at the Greene estate instead of taking his tutoring assignment. While there he learned of the problem of separating seeds from cotton fiber. Mrs. Greene said she was sure that Eli was clever enough to solve it, which turned out to be the case. Whitney formed a partnership with Miller to promote his invention, the cotton gin.

Miller, however, through bad policy, came close to wrecking the business in a variety of ways. The gin was pirated, lawsuits were fought badly, and Miller lost money on land speculation as well. In the final analysis, Whitney never made any significant amount of money on his ubiquitous gin.

Nevertheless, he had access to enough capital to enter another business, this time without Miller. Learning that the U.S. army needed muskets, he invented in 1798 the "American system" of using powered, specially designed machines to make interchangeable parts. The then-standard manufacturing system used one skilled maker to produce all the parts for an individual musket by hand. Whitney needed several years to design the machines, build the plant, train the workers, and produce the muskets. Although he continued to be in debt much of this time, ultimately he demonstrated that his method was far superior.

Even though the strength of Whitney's system seems obvious today, it was not so at first to his contemporaries. He was nine years late in fulfilling his first major government contract.

Aside from the manufacturing system, the most important of Whitney's inventions was the milling machine, a modified lathe that turns out irregularly shaped parts. Without the milling machine, it is difficult to see how standardized parts could ever have been invented. Whitney also invented the tumbler mill near the end of his life, although he was too ill to make anything more than drawings and plans.

Whitney's illness, which resulted in his death before the age of 60, was an enlargement of the prostate. He invented or reinvented the flexible catheter to relieve himself and probably thus gave himself another couple of years of life as well as some cessation of pain. That other American genius, Benjamin Franklin, may have made the same invention when faced with a similar problem in 1784.

Eli Whitney Jr.
Personal information
Nationality	American
Birth date	December 8, 1765
Birth place	Westborough, Massachusetts
Date of death	January 8, 1825 (aged 59)
Education	Prepared for Yale at Leicester Academy, Yale
Children	4
Work
Significant projects	Interchangeable parts , cotton gin

"Eli Whitney" redirects here. For other uses, see Eli Whitney (disambiguation).

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.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career inventions 2.1 Interchangeable parts 2.2 Cotton gin 2.3 Milling machine 3 Later life and legacy 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Early life

Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest child of Eli Whitney Sr., a prosperous farmer. His mother, Elizabeth Fay of Westborough, died when he was eleven.^{[citation needed]} At age fourteen he operated a profitable nail manufacturing operation in his father's workshop during the Revolutionary War.^[2] Because his stepmother opposed his wish to attend college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and schoolteacher to save money. He prepared for Yale at Leicester Academy (now Becker College) and under the tutelage of Rev.Elizur Goodrich of Durham, Connecticut he entered the Class of 1789, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792.^[1][3] Whitney expected to study law but, finding himself short of funds, accepted an offer to go to South Carolina as a private tutor. Instead of reaching his destination, he was convinced to visit Georgia.^[2] In the closing years of the eighteenth century, Georgia was a magnet for New Englanders seeking their fortunes (its Revolutionary era governor had been Lyman Hall, a migrant from Connecticut). When he initially sailed for South Carolina, among his shipmates were the widow and family of Revolutionary hero, General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. Mrs. Greene invited Whitney to visit her Georgia plantation, Mulberry Grove. Her plantation manager and husband-to-be was Phineas Miller, another Connecticut migrant and Yale graduate (Class of 1785), who would become Whitney's business partner.

Whitney is most famous for two innovations which later divided the United States in the mid-19th century: the cotton gin (1793), and his advocacy of interchangeable parts. In the South, the cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was harvested and reinvigorated slavery. While in the North, the adoption of interchangeable parts revolutionized the manufacturing industry, and in time contributed greatly to their victory in the Civil War.^[4]

Career inventions

Interchangeable parts

Main article: Interchangeable parts

Though Whitney is popularly credited with the invention of a musket that could be manufactured with interchangeable parts, the idea predated him. The idea is credited to Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, a French artillerist, and credits for finally perfecting the "armory system," or American system of manufacturing, is given by historian Merritt Roe Smith to Captain John H. Hall and by historian Diana Muir writing in Reflections in Bullough's Pond to Simeon North. In From the American System to Mass Production, historian David A. Hounshell described how de Gribeauval's idea propagated from France to the colonies via two routes: from Honoré Blanc through his friend Thomas Jefferson, and via Major Louis de Tousard, another French artillerist who was instrumental in establishing West Point, teaching the young officer corps of the Continental Army, and establishing the armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry.

By the late 1790s, Whitney was on the verge of bankruptcy and cotton gin litigation had left him deeply in debt. His New Haven cotton gin factory had burned to the ground, and litigation sapped his remaining resources. The French Revolution had ignited new conflicts between Great Britain, France, and the United States. The new American government, realizing the need to prepare for war, began to rearm. The War Department issued contracts for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets. Whitney, who had never made a gun in his life, obtained a contract in January, 1798 to deliver ten to fifteen thousand muskets in 1800. He had not mentioned interchangeable parts at that time. Ten months later, Treasury Secretary Wolcott sent him a "foreign pamphlet on arms manufacturing techniques," possibly one of Honoré Blanc's reports, after which Whitney first began to talk about interchangeability. After spending most of 1799-1801 in cotton gin litigation, Whitney began promoting the idea of interchangeable parts, and even arranged a public demonstration of the concept in order to gain time. He did not deliver on the contract until 1809, but then spent the rest of his life publicizing the idea of interchangeability.^[5]

Whitney's defenders have claimed that he invented the American system of manufacturing -- the combination of power machinery, interchangeable parts, and division of labor that would underlie the nation's subsequent industrial revolution. While there is persuasive evidence that he failed to achieve interchangeability, his use of power machinery and specialized division of labor are well documented ^[6]. When the government complained that Whitney's price per musket compared unfavorably with those produced in government armories, Whitney was able to calculate an actual price per musket by including fixed costs such as insurance and machinery, which the government had not included. He thus made early contributions to both the concept of cost accounting, and the concept of the efficiency of private industry.

Cotton gin

Main article: Cotton gin

The cotton gin is a mechanical device which removes the seeds from cotton, a process which, until the time of its invention, had been extremely labor-intensive. The word 'gin' is actually short for engine. The cotton gin was a wooden drum stuck with hooks, which pulled the cotton fibers through a mesh. The cotton seeds would not fit through the mesh and fell outside. Whitney occasionally told a story where he was pondering an improved method of seeding the cotton and he was inspired by observing a cat attempting to pull a chicken through a fence, and could only pull through some of the feathers.

A single cotton gin could generate up to fifty-five pounds of cleaned cotton daily. This contributed to the economic development of the Southern states of the United States, a prime cotton growing area; some historians believe that this invention allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable at a critical point in its development.

Cotton Gin Patent. It shows sawtooth gin blades, which were not part of Whitney's original patent.

Whitney received a patent (later numbered as X72) for his cotton gin on March 14, 1794; however, it was not validated until 1807. Whitney and his partner Miller did not intend to sell the gins. Rather, like the proprietors of grist and sawmills, they expected to charge farmers for cleaning their cotton - two-fifths of the profits, paid in cotton. Resentment at this scheme, the mechanical simplicity of the device, and the primitive state of patent law, made infringement inevitable. As Whitney and Miller were unable to produce enough gins to meet demand, imitation gins began to spread. Ultimately, patent infringement lawsuits consumed the profits and their cotton gin company went out of business in 1797.^[2] One oft-overlooked point is that Eli Whitney originally suffered drawbacks with his first design. There is significant evidence that the design flaws were solved by a woman named Katherine Green, who Whitney gave no public credit or recognition.^[7]

While the cotton gin did not earn Whitney the fortune he had hoped for, it did give him fame and the cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and the national economy.^[8] Southern cotton found ready markets in Europe and in the burgeoning textile mills of New England. Cotton agriculture revived the profitability of slavery and the political power of supporters of the South's "peculiar institution." By the 1820s, the dominant issues in American politics were driven by "King Cotton": maintaining the political balance between slave and free states and tariff protection for American industry. Cotton exports from the South boomed after the cotton gin's appearance (going from 180,000 pounds of total cotton production in 1793 to 93 million tons by 1810)^{[citation needed]} while New England manufacturing companies struggled to compete against imported goods and clamored for tariff protection. The cotton interests led the country into war with Mexico, expecting a vast expansion of cotton agriculture. Cotton was a staple that could be stored for long periods and shipped long distances, unlike most agricultural food production.

Paradoxically, the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, helped preserve the weakening arguments for slavery, since cheap (slave) labor was needed to pick cotton. Later, the 20th century invention of the cotton-picker reduced the labor-intensive demands of cotton farming, and brought unemployment to many poor Southerners.

Milling machine

Main article: Milling machine

Machine tool historian Joseph W. Roe credited Eli Whitney with inventing the first milling machine. Subsequent work by other historians (Woodbury, Smith, Muir) suggests that Whitney was among a group of contemporaries all developing milling machines at about the same time (1814 to 1818). Therefore, no one person can properly be described as the inventor of the milling machine.

Later life and legacy

South side of Eli Whitney monument in the Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut

North side of monument

Despite his humble origins, Whitney was keenly aware of the value of social and political connections. In building his arms business, he took full advantage of the access that his status as a Yale alumnus gave him to other well-placed graduates, such as Secretary of War Oliver Wolcott (Class of 1778) and New Haven developer and political leader James Hillhouse. His 1817 marriage to Henrietta Edwards, granddaughter of the famed evangelist Jonathan Edwards, daughter of Pierpont Edwards, head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, and first cousin of Yale's president, Timothy Dwight, the state's leading Federalist, further tied him to Connecticut's ruling elite. In a business dependent on government contracts, such connections were essential to success.

Whitney died at age 59 of prostate cancer on January 8, 1825, in New Haven, CT, leaving a widow and four children. During the course of his illness, he invented and constructed several devices to ease his pain mechanically. These devices, drawings of which are in his collected papers, were effective but were never manufactured for use of others due to his heirs' reluctance to trade in "indelicate" items.

At his death, his armory was left in the charge of his talented nephews, Eli Whitney Blake and Philos Blake, notable inventors and manufacturers in their own right (they invented the mortise lock and the stone-crushing machine).

Eli Whitney Blake (1820-1894) assumed control of the armory in 1841. Working under contract to inventor Samuel Colt, the younger Whitney manufactured the famous "Whitneyville Walker Colts" for the Texas Rangers. The success of this contract rescued Colt from financial ruin and enabled him to establish his own famous arms company. Whitney's marriage to Sarah Dalliba, daughter of the U.S. Army's chief of ordinance, helped to assure the continuing success of his business.

The younger Whitney organized the New Haven Water Company, which began operations in 1862. While this enterprise addressed the city's need for water, it also enabled Whitney to increase the amount of power available for his manufacturing operations at the expense of the water company's stockholders. A new dam made it possible to consolidate his operations—originally located in three sites along the Mill River—in a single plant. This dam still exists.

Whitney's grandson, Eli Whitney IV (1847-1924), sold the Whitney Armory to Winchester Repeating Arms, another notable New Haven gun company, in 1888. He served as president of the water company until his death and was a major New Haven business and civic leader. He played an important role in the development of New Haven's Ronan-Edgehill Neighborhood.

Following the closure of the armory, the factory site continued to be used for a variety of industrial purposes, including the water company. Many of the original armory buildings remained intact until the 1960s. In the 1970s, as part of the Bicentennial celebration, interested citizens organized the Eli Whitney Museum, which opened to the public in 1984. The site today includes the boarding house and barn that served Eli Whitney's original workers and a stone storage building from the original armory. Museum exhibits and programs are housed in a factory building constructed c. 1910. A water company office building constructed in the 1880s now houses educational programs operated by the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority (which succeeded the New Haven Water Company).

Eli Whitney and his descendants are buried in New Haven's historic Grove Street Cemetery.^[9] Yale College's Eli Whitney Students Program, which is one of the four doors into Yale College, is named after Whitney in recognition of his venerable age at the time of his entrance to Yale College in 1789; he was twenty-three years old. Eli Whitney is the great, great grandfather of Eli Whitney Debevoise II, the current U.S. Executive Director of the World Bank Group.

Mr. Whitney was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1975.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Elms and Magnolias: The 18th Century". Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 1996-08-16. http://www.library.yale.edu/mssa/elms/18th.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-19. 
2. ^ ^{a b c} MIT Inventor of the Week archive profile. From a website funded and administered by Lemelson-MIT Program. Accessed 18 March 2008.
3. ^ Who Belongs To Phi Beta Kappa, ’Phi Beta Kappa website’’, accessed Oct 4, 2009
4. ^ New Georgia Encyclopedia: Eli Whitney in Georgia Accessed 19 March 2008.
5. ^ Hounshell, David A. (1984), From the American system to mass production, 1800-1932: The development of manufacturing technology in the United States, Baltimore, Maryland, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, LCCN 83-016269, ISBN 978-0-8018-2975-8 .
6. ^ Woodbury, Robert S. (1960). "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts." Technology & Culture 1.
7. ^ Eli Whitney Project A website for The Eli Whitney Project
8. ^ The Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop A website for The Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, CT.
9. ^ "A Chronicle of Eminent People buried in Grove Street Cemetery". Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery. http://www.grovestreetcemetery.org/Grove_Street_Cemetery_Chronicle_of_Eminent_People.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-19. 

Further reading

• Battison, Edwin. (1960). "Eli Whitney and the Milling Machine." Smithsonian Journal of History I.
• Cooper, Carolyn, & Lindsay, Merrill K. (1980). Eli Whitney and the Whitney Armory.
• Whitneyville, CT: Eli Whitney Museum.
• Dexter, Franklin B. (1911). "Eli Whitney." Yale Biographies and Annals, 1792-1805. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Company.
• Hall, Karyl Lee Kibler, & Cooper, Carolyn. (1984). Windows on the Works: Industry on the Eli Whitney Site, 1798-1979.
• Hamden, CT: Eli Whitney Museum
• Hounshell, David A. (1984), From the American system to mass production, 1800-1932: The development of manufacturing technology in the United States, Baltimore, Maryland, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, LCCN 83-016269, ISBN 978-0-8018-2975-8 .
• Lakwete, Angela. (2004). Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Smith, Merritt Roe. 1973. "John H. Hall, Simeon North, and the Milling Machine: The Nature of Innovation among Antebellum Arms Makers." Technology & Culture 14.
• Woodbury, Robert S. (1960). "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts." Technology & Culture 1.
• Iles, George (1912), Leading American Inventors, New York: Henry Holt and Company, pp. 75-103, http://www.archive.org/details/leadingamericani00ilesrich 

External links

• The Eli Whitney Museum
• Eli Whitney Biography on at Whitney Research Group
• Inventor of the Week: Eli Whitney (MIT)
• Entry in New Georgia Encyclopedia
•  "Whitney, Eli". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

Persondata
NAME	Whitney, Eli
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American inventor
DATE OF BIRTH	December 8, 1765(1765-12-08)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Westborough, Massachusetts, United States
DATE OF DEATH	January 8, 1825
PLACE OF DEATH	New Haven, Connecticut, United States

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