Whitney, Eli

Whitney, Eli (1765–1825), inventor and arms manufacturer.Born in Westboro, Massachusetts, the eldest son of farmer Eli Whitney and Elizabeth Fay Whitney, Eli Whitney demonstrated mechanical talent earlier than scholarship, but belatedly graduated from Yale in 1792. Upon graduation Whitney accepted a position as a tutor in Georgia, travelling with Yale alumnus Phineas Miller and Miller's employer, Catherine Greene, the widow of Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. When the expected tutorship fell through, Greene invited Whitney to remain at her plantation near Savannah.

There he learned of the urgent need for an improved cotton gin (short for “engin e”). The grooved roller gin used for removing the black seeds from the bolls of the long‐staple cotton grown in coastal Georgia failed to dislodge with equal ease the tenacious green seeds of the upland short‐staple cotton. With Greene's encouragement, workshop, and materials, Whitney constructed a model in which a hook‐studded rotating cylinder pulled cotton fiber through slots in a metal barrier, leaving seeds behind. Powered by horse or waterwheel, Whitney's gin could clean as much cotton as fifty people working by hand.

Backed by Greene, Phineas Miller and Eli Whitney formed a partnership to build and operate such gins. In 1793 Whitney obtained a patent and began gin production in New Haven, Connecticut. Southern plantations vastly expanded their acreages of cotton for export to England's textile factories. As cotton harvests outstripped Miller and Whitney's capacity to meet the demand for ginning, southern blacksmiths made gins without paying for the patent, embroiling Miller and Whitney in costly and prolonged lawsuits. Whitney's patent, although finally upheld in southern courts before expiring in 1807, garnered him small reward.

Meanwhile, deep in debt from the cotton‐gin venture, Whitney won a contract from the U.S. government in 1798 to produce ten thousand muskets in an incredibly short two years. Responding to the desire of French‐influenced U.S. Ordnance officers for uniform military muskets, Whitney propounded the elusive goal of interchangeable parts. He built a water‐powered factory outside New Haven, and trained unskilled workers to specialize in using different “molds and patterns” to standardize filling and drilling. They produced quantities of individual parts before fitting them together into complete muskets. With contract extensions, they completed the ten thousand muskets in ten years. By modern standards, their parts were not interchangeable, nor were those made then at other armories.

Through technological exchange among private arms contractors and the federal armories, however, such methods spread, along with gauges intended to induce uniformity. With subsequent inventions such as Thomas Blanchard's gunstock lathe and the milling machines of Simeon North and John Hall, arms makers were producing standard military muskets with interchangeable parts by the late 1840s. Over the next half‐century, other manufacturers adapted armory methods for high‐volume production of sewing machines, typewriters, watches, bicycles, and, in the early twentieth century, automobiles.

Eli Whitney married Henrietta Edwards in 1817 and began a family before prostate cancer ended his life at age sixty. Posthumous heroic stories credited Whitney with inventing both the cotton gin and interchangeable parts. Historians of technology have debunked this oversimplification, which lingers even into the twenty‐first century.
See also Cotton Industry; Factory System; Industrialization; Mass Production; Military, The; Slavery: Development and Expansion of Slavery; Weaponry, Nonnuclear.

Bibliography

Constance McLaughlin Green , Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology, 1956.
Merritt Roe Smith , Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 1977.

Carolyn C. Cooper