Eli Whitney Eli Whitney was an American inventor best
known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial
Revolution and shaped the economy of the Antebellum South. Whitney's invention made upland short
cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the
United States. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost many
profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned
his attention into securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets
for the newly formed United States Army. He continued making arms and inventing until
his death in 1825. Early life and education
Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest child of Eli
Whitney Sr., a prosperous farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Fay, also of Westborough.
Although the younger Eli, born in 1765, could technically be called a "Junior", history
has never known him as such. He was famous during his lifetime and afterward by the name
"Eli Whitney". His son, born in 1820, also named Eli, was well known during his lifetime
and afterward by the name "Eli Whitney, Jr." Whitney's mother, Elizabeth Fay, died in 1777,
when he was 11. At age 14 he operated a profitable nail manufacturing operation in his father's
workshop during the Revolutionary War. Because his stepmother opposed his wish to
attend college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and school teacher 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. 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. In the closing
years of the 18th 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
the Revolutionary hero Gen. 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. In the North the adoption of interchangeable
parts revolutionized the manufacturing industry, and contributed greatly to the U.S. victory
in the Civil War. Career
Interchangeable parts Eli Whitney has often been incorrectly credited
with inventing the idea of interchangeable parts, which he championed for years as a
maker of muskets; however, the idea predated Whitney, and Whitney's role in it was one
of promotion and popularizing, not invention. Successful implementation of the idea eluded
Whitney until near the end of his life, occurring first in others' armories.
Attempts at interchangeability of parts can be traced back as far as the Punic Wars through
both archaeological remains of boats now in Museo Archeologico Baglio Anselmi and contemporary
written accounts. In modern times the idea developed over decades among many people.
An early leader was Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, an 18th-century French artillerist
who created a fair amount of standardization of artillery pieces, although not true interchangeability
of parts. He inspired others, including Honoré Blanc and Louis de Tousard, to work further
on the idea, and on shoulder weapons as well as artillery. In the 19th century these efforts
produced the "armory system," or American system of manufacturing. Certain other New
Englanders, including Captain John H. Hall and Simeon North, arrived at successful interchangeability
before Whitney's armory did. The Whitney armory finally succeeded not long after his death
in 1825. The motives behind Whitney's acceptance of
a contract to manufacture muskets in 1798 were mostly monetary. By the late 1790s, Whitney
was on the verge of bankruptcy and the 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 10,000
to 15,000 muskets in 1800. He had not mentioned interchangeable parts at that time. Ten months
later, the Treasury Secretary, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., 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. In May 1798, Congress voted for legislation
that would use eight hundred thousand dollars in order to pay for small arms and cannons
in case war with France erupted. They offered a 5,000 dollar incentive with an additional
5,000 dollars once that money was exhausted for the person that was able to accurately
produce arms for the government. Because the cotton gin had not brought Whitney the rewards
he believed he would get, he accepted the contract. Although the contract was for one
year, Whitney did not deliver the arms until eight years later in 1809 using multiple excuses
for the delay of such. Recently, historians have found that during 1801–1806, Whitney
took the money and headed into South Carolina in order to profit from the cotton gin.
Although Whitney's demonstration of 1801 appeared to show the ingenuity of interchangeable parts,
Merritt Roe Smith concludes that Whitney's demonstration was "staged" and "duped government
authorities" into believing that he had created interchangeable parts. The charade was only
useful in order to gain more time and resources for the project but not to create interchangeable
parts. 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 The cotton gin is a mechanical device that
removes the seeds from cotton, a process that had previously been extremely labor-intensive.
The word gin is short for engine. The cotton gin was a wooden drum stuck with hooks that
pulled the cotton fibers through a mesh. The cotton seeds would not fit through the mesh
and fell outside. Whitney occasionally told a story wherein he was pondering an improved
method of seeding the cotton when 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 55 pounds (25 kg) 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. Whitney received a patent (later numbered
as X72) for his cotton gin on March 14, 1794, but 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 value, paid in cotton. Resentment at this scheme, the mechanical simplicity of
the device and the primitive state of patent law, made infringement inevitable. Whitney
and Miller could not build enough gins to meet demand, so gins from other makers found
ready sale. Ultimately, patent infringement lawsuits consumed the profits and their cotton
gin company went out of business in 1797. One oft-overlooked point is that there were
drawbacks to Whitney's first design. There is significant evidence that the design flaws
were solved by a plantation owner, Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of the American Revolutionary
War general Nathanael Greene; Whitney gave her no public credit or recognition.
While the cotton gin did not earn Whitney the fortune he had hoped for, it did give
him fame. It has been argued by some historians that
Whitney's cotton gin was an important if unintended cause of the American Civil War. Before the
invention of the cotton gin, slavery had been on the decline; in fact many slaveholders
had even given away their slaves. After Whitney's invention, the plantation slavery industry
was rejuvenated, eventually culminating in the Civil War.
And the cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and the national economy. Southern cotton
found ready markets in Europe and in the burgeoning textile mills of New England. Cotton exports
from the U.S. boomed after the cotton gin's appearance – from less than 500,000 pounds
(230,000 kg) in 1793 to 93 million pounds (42,000,000 kg) by 1810. Cotton was a staple
that could be stored for long periods and shipped long distances, unlike most agricultural
products. It became the U.S.'s chief export, representing over half the value of U.S. exports
from 1820 to 1860. Paradoxically, the cotton gin, a labor-saving
device, helped preserve slavery in the U.S. Before the 1790s, slave labor was primarily
employed in growing rice, tobacco, and indigo, none of which were especially profitable any
more. Neither was cotton, due to the difficulty of seed removal. But with the gin, growing
cotton with slave labor became highly profitable – the chief source of wealth in the American
South, and the basis of frontier settlement from Georgia to Texas. "King Cotton" became
a dominant economic force, and slavery was sustained as a key institution of Southern
society. Milling machine
Machine tool historian Joseph W. Roe credited Whitney with inventing the first milling machine
circa 1818. Subsequent work by other historians (Woodbury; Smith; Muir; Battison ]) suggests
that Whitney was among a group of contemporaries all developing milling machines at about the
same time (1814 to 1818), and that the others were more important to the innovation than
Whitney was. (The machine that excited Roe may not have been built until 1825, after
Whitney's death.) Therefore, no one person can properly be described as the inventor
of the milling machine. Later life and legacy
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 Oliver Wolcott,
Jr., Secretary of the Treasury (class of 1778), and James Hillhouse, a New Haven developer
and political leader. 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, in New Haven, Connecticut, just a
month after his 59th birthday. He left a widow and his four children behind. During the course
of his illness, he invented and constructed several devices to mechanically ease his pain.
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. The Eli Whitney Students Program, Yale University's
admissions program for non-traditional students, is named after Whitney who matriculated into
Yale when he was 23.