Whitney, Eli

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Whitney, Eli

Born December 8, 1765 (Westborough, Massachusetts)

Died January 8, 1825 (New Haven, Connecticut)

Inventor, engineer, manufacturer

Eli Whitney is one of the most influential inventors in American history. Though most noted for inventing the cotton gin, he made his greatest contribution to industry by creating a manufacturing process for making muskets (firearms) with interchangeable parts. A part from one musket could fit any other musket he made. Whitney revolutionized industrial production by establishing the basis for the future assembly line and modern mass production. He was a pioneer in creating machine tools, which could make each part of a musket separately with consistent precision. With this new manufacturing process, unskilled workers could mass-produce items that were previously made very slowly by individual skilled craftsmen.

"One of my primary objects is to form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion."

The cotton gin, on the other hand, was a mechanically simple device. Therefore, its importance was more in the social and economic realm. The cotton gin led to a booming Southern economy and greatly increased the use of slaves in the United States. Some eighty thousand slaves were brought into the United States between 1790 and 1808, the year that Congress finally banned the importation of slaves.

Whitney's influence on agriculture in the South and manufacturing in the North was enormous. By 1815, Whitney's manufacturing system was widely known and used by other firearm makers; it was also used for making such diverse products as wooden clocks and sewing machines. By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was supplying three-fourths of the world's cotton. Cotton made up some 60 percent of U.S. exports at that time.

A child with mechanical ability

Eli Whitney was born in December 1765 to Eli and Elizabeth Whitney in Westborough, Massachusetts, east of Worcester. They were a long-established family in the region. Ancestor John Whitney had emigrated from England to Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1635. The Whitneys were successful farmers in the Worcester area, and the older Eli also served as justice of the peace of Westborough. Young Eli grew up well cared for. His parents intended for him to go to college, but he was not interested in books. Farmwork did not appeal to him either. He had other interests, including working with his hands. Since early childhood, Eli had a great mechanical ability in working with tools found around the farm.

As he got older, Whitney made and repaired violins and at age fifteen began manufacturing nails. Nails were especially needed during the American Revolution (1775–83) to build various kinds of military buildings, bridges, forts, and defensive structures. Young Eli even hired a helper to meet orders for his nails. The demand for nails declined following the war, so Whitney turned to production of hatpins (pins used to secure women's hats on their heads) which sold well around the region.

Finally, at age at eighteen, Whitney decided that he would need a college degree to progress further. However, his parents were no longer financially able to pay for his college expenses. Therefore, Whitney began teaching at various schools to save money for college. He entered Leicester Academy in Leicester, Massachusetts, for final academic preparation before entering college. In May 1789, at twenty-three years of age, Whitney entered Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut. While pursuing his studies at Yale, he earned money repairing equipment at the college.

Off to the South

Whitney did well at Yale. Following graduation in the fall of 1792, he decided to pursue law studies. In order to earn money while studying law, he accepted a job as a tutor in Georgia. While aboard ship on his way from New England to Savannah, Georgia, he met Catharine Littlefield Greene (1755–1814; see entry in volume 1), widow of war hero GeneralNathanael Greene (1742–1786). Realizing Whitney had no place to stay and little money, Greene invited him to stay at her plantation near Savannah, known as Mulberry Grove. There, he could make money by solving mechanical problems around the grounds.

While Whitney was staying at the plantation, many guests and neighbors dropped by for visits with Greene. Sitting in on the conversations, Whitney learned that the South's agricultural economy was struggling because the demand for tobacco was in decline. There was a high demand for cotton in Britain, but much of the land more than 50 miles from the coastline was not suitable for growing rice or black seed cotton with long fibers (called staples) that were common crops in the coastal area. However, a different variety of cotton, a short-staple cotton with sticky green seeds, could be readily grown on the plentiful higher, drier soils in the interior regions away from the coast. Separating the sticky seeds from the fluffy white cotton bolls was difficult. The green seed cotton could not be grown for profit since a single slave could separate only a pound of it each day using hand combs. Visitors to the plantation said a machine was needed to separate the seeds from the fibers. Greene suggested to Whitney that he could tackle the problem during his stay at the plantation. She would cover the costs of the development and provide a workshop.

The cotton gin

Taking the challenge, in ten days Whitney assembled a crude cotton gin ("gin" is short for engine) with which to experiment. By April 1793, he had a much improved though still simple model (see box). A slave could process 50 pounds of cotton a day with this device.

At the plantation, Whitney became friends with Phineas Miller, manager of the plantation. Miller was about the same age as Whitney and had graduated from Yale as well. The two decided to patent Whitney's new cotton gin and begin manufacturing the machine. They signed a partnership agreement in late May to manufacture machines and operate a cotton ginning business throughout the South. They dreamed of creating a monopoly and getting rich. (A monopoly is where a person or company has complete control over a product or a service.)

The Cotton Gin

Eli Whitney's invention to separate sticky seeds from short cotton fibers was very simple in design. It used a hand-cranked cylinder containing a series of teeth to separate the cotton from the seeds. This process was a mechanized version of the hand-combing method that slaves used to clean the cotton. Other gins had been in use at various times, so Whitney's creation was not altogether new. After Whitney's invention went public, many others built slight variations of the device.

Whitney's device included only a few basic parts: a hopper to feed the cotton into; a revolving cylinder with hundreds of short curved hooks placed in lines; and numerous wires spun through narrow grooves in a stationary piece. The seeds passed through the narrow grooves while the cotton fibers flowed through the revolving cylinder. Last in the process were bristles that combed the cleaned fibers from the wire hooks.

Shortly after Whitney's gins began operating, concerns arose that the cotton fibers were being unacceptably damaged. It took over a year to determine that the machines did not unnecessarily harm the fibers. Larger versions of the cotton gin were soon developed besides those that were cranked by hand. The larger models could be driven by horses or water power.

Whitney returned to New Haven to begin producing the cotton gins to ship to Miller in Georgia. He received a patent on March 14, 1794. They suffered a setback in 1795 when Whitney's shop burned down. In addition, the cotton gin was such a simple device that others could easily reproduce it. Soon, many people were making and using cotton gins much like Whitney's. Whitney began a number of lawsuits to stop others from producing the cotton gins like his. However, the lawsuits proved unsuccessful and consumed a lot of time and money. By 1797, Whitney and Miller were out of business.

A personal economic bust

Though the cotton gin business did not bring its originators financial success, it did revive the Southern economy, which was now booming. The production of cotton doubled every decade following Whitney's invention. Before Whitney's cotton gin in 1792, the United States exported only 138,000 pounds of cotton. Just two years later, exports rose to 1.6 million pounds, and in 1795 cotton exports reached 6.3 million pounds. By 1800, the United States was producing 35 million pounds of cotton and exporting just over half of that. Although plantations expanded across the South and grew in size, the growth of cities and industry in the South was hindered by the emphasis on agriculture brought on by the cotton gin.

Perhaps feeling that Whitney and Miller deserved some reward for sparking the South's economic boom, the state of South Carolina gave them a payment of $50,000 in 1802. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia also paid the partners for their effort. They received a total of $90,000. However, this still did not cover their expenses from the past ten years. Miller died in 1803 having lost money in the cotton gin venture. In 1812, Whitney's patent application needed to be renewed; however, Congress denied the renewal application.

Gun manufacturing

After seeing his cotton gin bring economic success to almost everyone but himself, Whitney tackled a different manufacturing project in 1797. The U.S. government was issuing contracts for the production of forty thousand military muskets. The prospects of war with France were growing, and the United States was readying its forces. Whitney submitted a proposal to build ten thousand muskets in just two years. This was a phenomenal rate of production for the late 1790s, especially for a person with no firearm-making experience and no factory, tools, or workers. The two existing U.S. armories had only produced one thousand muskets in the previous three years.

Whitney received a contract on January 14, 1798, for $134,000. Twenty-seven other gun manufacturers also received contracts. Whitney proposed to use a new method to produce firearms. He would create individual precision parts for the musket by machine, making each piece identical to others of its kind. This method allowed Whitney to use unskilled laborers rather than craftsmen, so he could make muskets much faster than other manufacturers and with less expense. Whitney became the first manufacturer in America to make a product with interchangeable parts. Until this time, muskets and other firearms were made one at a time by skilled craftsmen, with each part made specifically for that firearm. If a part broke, a new part would have to be made to fit that specific firearm.

Interchangeable parts

Whitney first found ten investors to provide money for his enterprise. He then purchased a 100-acre mill site with a 6-foot-high log dam on Mill River near New Haven. There, he built a factory and rebuilt the aging dam. The water spilling over the dam would provide the power to fuel his machines. He hired about fifty skilled workers to work on this initial phase of building the factory and the operating machines. Whitney also built a row of five stone houses for the married workmen and their families and a boardinghouse for single men. (This was the first time an American employer had provided residences for workers.) He also built a stone building for a store. The new community was named Whitneyville, the first manufacturing village in the nation. Whitney was unmarried and lived in a nearby farmhouse with three nephews and servants. He also brought in about a dozen mechanical apprentices at a time, and they stayed at the farmhouse, too.

Whitney then began designing and making the machines and tools he needed to make muskets. Expenses grew unexpectedly as the process unfolded, but he continued receiving financial support from investors. After overcoming numerous problems in designing his factory, which was the first of its kind, Whitney began producing muskets. However, he produced only five hundred the first year, rather than the four thousand called for in the government contract. Other problems arose, too, including a long severe winter that froze the flowing water that powered the machines. A yellow fever epidemic struck many of the workers, and Whitney had problems receiving supplies.

According to some accounts, when Whitney journeyed to Washington, D.C., in 1801 to request a time extension on his contract, he gave a memorable demonstration. Whitney set out a pile of parts, enough to make ten muskets, and challenged the government officials to assemble the muskets. They did it very successfully. The officials were greatly impressed with Whitney's ideas and gave him his extension.

A profitable business

Despite the continuous problems at the new factory, the government kept giving Whitney extensions to his contract as they remained greatly enthused by the process he was developing. Now unskilled laborers could produce a musket in simple steps; musket production was no longer a time-consuming, complex task that required a craftsman. The federal government adopted the manufacturing system in its two armories to produce firearms at a considerable savings. In the end, it would take eight years to produce a total of ten thousand.

At the beginning of the War of 1812 (1812–15), Whitney received another government contract; he was asked to manufacture fifteen thousand firearms. He also received a contract for another fifteen thousand firearms from the State of New York. Because of these government orders, Whitney's firearms business was much more profitable than his cotton gin enterprise.

The social life

Aside from the considerable time and energy that Whitney poured into his work, he also enjoyed refined life in society. He had a dignified manner and a pleasant personality; he also had strong opinions. Some claimed his greatest attribute was the perseverance he showed in developing his inventions.

On January 6, 1817, at fifty-one years of age, Whitney married Henrietta Frances Edwards, granddaughter of one of the great American religious figures in the eighteenth-century, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). They had four children, but one died young. Whitney died in New Haven in 1825. At first, two nephews took over operations and delivered another fifteen thousand muskets. His only son, Eli Whitney Jr., took over in 1842 and expanded the factory. In 1888, the Whitneyville factory was sold to Winchester Repeating Arms.