Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney (b. December 8, 1765 — d. January 8, 1825) was an American inventor.

American inventor, pioneer, mechanical engineer, and manufacturer Eli Whitney is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin. He also affected the industrial development of the United States when, in manufacturing muskets for the government, he translated the concept of interchangeable parts into a manufacturing system, giving birth to the American mass-production concept. Whitney saw that a machine to clean the seed from cotton could make the South prosperous and make its inventor rich. He set to work at once and within days had drawn a sketch to explain his idea; 10 days later he constructed a crude model that separated fiber from seed.

After perfecting his machine he filed an application for a patent on June 20, 1793; in February 1794 he deposited a model at the Patent Office, and on March 14 he received his patent. Whitney's gin brought the South prosperity, but the unwillingness of the planters to pay for its use and the ease with which the gin could be pirated put Whitney's company out of business by 1797.

When Congress refused to renew the patent, which expired in 1807, Whitney concluded that 'an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.' He never patented his later inventions, one of which was a milling machine. His genius as expressed in tools, machines, and technological ideas made the southern United States dominant in cotton production and the northern states a bastion of industry.

Invention Impact

The cotton gin gave birth to the American mass-production concept

Inventor Bio

Born in Westboro, Massachusetts, Whitney decided in 1783 to get a college education. His own efforts were supplemented by his father's financial help, and after six years preparation he was admitted to Yale College, graduating in 1792.

Early life

Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest child of Eli Whitney, a prosperous farmer, and Elizabeth Fay of Westborough. Very early in life he demonstrated his mechanical genius and entrepreneurial acumen, operating a profitable nail manufacturing operation in his father's workshop during the American Revolution. Because his step-mother opposed his wish to attend college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and schoolteacher to save money. He prepared for Yale under the tutelage of Rev. Elizur Goodrich of Durham, Connecticut and entered the Class of 1792.^[1]

Whitney expected to study law but, finding himself short of funds on graduation, accepted an offer to go to South Carolina as a private tutor. Instead of reaching his destination, he was convinced to visit Georgia. 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 was 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.

Somewhat ironically, Whitney's two most famous innovations would divide the country in the mid-19th century; the cotton gin (1793), which revolutionized the way Southern cotton was cropped and reinvigorated slavery; and his interchangeable parts, that would revolutionize Northern industry and, in time, be a major factor in the North's victory in the Civil War.

Career inventions

File:Cotton-gin.jpg

Cotton gin

Cotton gin

The cotton gin is a mechanical device which removes the seeds from cotton, a process which had, until the time of its invention, been extremely labor-intensive. 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.

The 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.

Like so much about Whitney's career, his claims as inventor of the cotton gin were disputed both in his own time and in our own. 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. Whitney's cotton gin company went out of business in 1797.

While the cotton gin did not earn Whitney the fortune he had hoped for, it did transform Southern agriculture and the national economy. 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. The cotton interests led the country into war with Mexico, expecting a vast expansion of cotton agriculture.

Interchangeable parts

Although Whitney is popularly credited with the invention of a musket that could be manufactured with interchangeable parts, the idea predates him and he never succeeded at it. The idea is credited to Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, a French artillerist, and credit for finally perfecting the "armory system," or American system of manufacturing, is given to Captain John H. Hall. In From the American System to Mass Production, historian David Hounshell describes how de Gribeauval's idea propagated from France to the colonies via two routes: from Honoré Blanc via 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 in establishing the armories at Springfield and Harper's 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 England, 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. (Hounshell, pp 30-32)

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 (Woodbury 1960). 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.

Later life

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, like 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 of prostate cancer on January 8, 1825, leaving a widow and four children.

Legacy

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

Eli Whitney, Jr. (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 the younger Whitney to increase the amount of power available for his manufacturing operations at the expense of the water company's stockholders. Originally located in three sites along the Mill River, the new dam made it possible to consolidate his operations in a single plant.

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. 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 1792; he was twenty-seven years old.

American inventor, pioneer, mechanical engineer, and manufacturer Eli Whitney is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin. Whitney's gin brought the South prosperity, but the unwillingness of the planters to pay for its use and the ease with which the gin could be pirated put Whitney's company out of business by 1797.

He also affected the industrial development of the United States when, in manufacturing muskets for the government, he translated the concept of interchangeable parts into a manufacturing system, giving birth to the American mass-production concept.

Whitney was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1974.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Battison, Edwin. Eli Whitney and the Milling Machine. Smithsonian Journal of History I, 1960.
• Cooper, Carolyn, & Lindsay, Merrill K. Eli Whitney and the Whitney Armory. 1980.
• Dexter, Franklin B. . Eli Whitney. Yale Biographies and Annals, 1792-1805. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Company, 1911.
• Hall, Karyl Lee Kibler, & Cooper, Carolyn. Windows on the Works: Industry on the Eli Whitney Site, 1798-1979. 1984.
• Hamden, CT: Eli Whitney Museum.
• Hounshell, David A. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932. Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
• Lakwete, Angela. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
• Smith, Merritt Roe. John H. Hall, Simeon North, and the Milling Machine:The Nature of Innovation among Antebellum Arms Makers. Technology & Culture 14. 1973.
• Whitneyville, CT: Eli Whitney Museum.
• Woodbury, Robert S. The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts. Technology & Culture 1. 1960.

External links

• The Eli Whitney Museum. www.eliwhitney.org. Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Essay CottonTimes.com. www.cottontimes.co.uk. Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Eli Whitney Biography on at Whitney Research Group. www.whitneygen.org. Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• About.com. www.inventors.about.com. Retrieved June 20, 2007.
• Inventor of the Week: Eli Whitney (MIT). web.mit.edu. Retrieved June 20, 2007.

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