Eli Whitney

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Whitney, Eli

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

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.

(1765–1825), inventor and firearms manufacturer

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.

Whitney, Eli, 1765-1825, American inventor of the cotton gin, b. Westboro, Mass., grad. Yale, 1792. When he was staying as tutor at Mulberry Grove, the plantation of Mrs. Nathanael Greene, Whitney was encouraged by Mrs. Greene and visiting cotton planters to try to find some device by which the fiber of short-staple cotton could be rapidly separated from the seed. Whitney, whose creative mechanical bent had been evident from boyhood, completed his model gin early in 1793, after about 10 days of work, and by April had built an improved one. With Phineas Miller, Mrs. Greene's plantation manager (and later her husband), he formed a partnership to manufacture gins at New Haven. He was unable to make enough gins to meet the demand, and although the partners received a patent in 1794, others copied his model and soon many gins were in use. After much litigation the partners received (1807) a favorable decision to protect their patent, but Congress in 1812 denied Whitney's petition for its renewal. His invention, which had immense economic and social effects, brought great wealth to many others, but little to Whitney himself. In 1798 he built a firearms factory near New Haven. The muskets his workmen made by methods comparable to those of modern mass industrial production were the first to have standardized, interchangeable parts.

Bibliography

See biographies by J. Mirsky and A. Nevins (1962) and D. Olmsted (1846, repr. 1972); C. M. Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (1956).

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