Whitney, Eli (1765-1825)

Eli Whitney (1765-1825)

Source

Inventor

Cotton Gin. One of the most influential inventors in American history was born in Westboro, Massachusetts, in 1765. Eli Whitney was raised in poor circumstances but became so adept at making nails that he saved enough money to attend Yale College. After graduating in 1792 he traveled to Georgia to act as a tutor for a wealthy family but declined the position when he learned it did not pay what he had been promised. Fortunately, the widow of Gen. Nathanael Greene invited him to stay at her plantation at Mulberry Grove, near Savannah. While there he became intrigued with the manner in which slaves removed the seeds from picked cotton. All the work was done by hand, and Whitney began experimenting with a machine that could accomplish the same results but in an easier fashion. In 1793 he exhibited his “cotton gin” (gin was short for engine), a simple device that had profound ramifications. The machine was a hand-cranked cylinder with a series of teeth that pulled cotton from the seed. Beforehand it took one slave ten hours to clean three pounds of cotton by hand; with the cotton gin the full day’s work of several laborers could be accomplished in one hour.

Impact. The significance of the invention was immediately apparent in the massive increase of cotton production: in 1790 the United States produced four thousand bales of cotton; by 1820 it was 73, 222 bales; and by 1840 the figure had risen to 1, 347, 640. Despite patenting his machine in 1794, Whitney had difficulty protecting it from easily made reproductions, and realized little profit on his famous invention. The cotton gin was less notable for its technology than for its economic and social consequences. Whitney had hoped that by making the task of cleaning cotton so inexpensive he might help eliminate slavery. Instead the resulting boom in the cotton business in the Deep South gave new life to the institution, and southern planters became even more dependent on, and defensive about, slavery.

Mass Production. From a technical point of view Whitney’s greatest contribution was his system of manufacturing guns with interchangeable parts. In late 1798, while trying to raise funds for the legal battles over his cotton gin, Whitney made the bold proposal to the War Department that he could manufacture four thousand muskets in less than two years. Rather than craft each musket by hand, as had been the custom, he designed a milling machine which would make parts exactly the same every time. Although this method would become the basis of modern mass production, Whitney at that time had no factory or tools to manufacture the muskets, and he was nine years late delivering the weapons.

Later Life. Whitney eventually built a factory with workers’ residences around it, which became the town of Whitneyville, Connecticut. The inventor also devised a set of moral guidelines by which his laborers would live. Like other industrial reformers such as Samuel Slater and Francis Cabot Lowell, his goal was to have healthy, happy workers, although the employees themselves might have found the arrangements confining. In any case, at Whitneyville were the milling machines and assembly lines and efficient labor that Whitney had created, a major contribution to America’s industrial transformation. Whitney died in New Haven in 1825.

Source

Constance M. Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956).