Whitney, Eli

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Eli Whitney

Born December 8, 1765

Westborough, Massachusetts

Died January 8, 1825

New Haven, Connecticut

American inventor

"He can make anything."

—Catherine Greene, recommending Eli Whitney to planters who needed a machine to comb seeds from cotton.

Eli Whitney is well known as the inventor of the cotton gin, a device that pulled cotton from the seed and influenced the course of American history in ways that are both obvious and subtle. The Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic change that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, could be said to have started influencing life in the United States in April 1793. It was in that month that Eli Whitney, a young graduate of Yale University, first demonstrated a machine for extracting the sticky, green seeds from bolls of cotton. It was a called a cotton gin (gin being short for engine).

The cotton gin had two enormous consequences for American history. First, it revived cotton as a cash crop in the South, and helped keep the South a largely agricultural economy for most of the nineteenth century. Second, cotton crops supported large plantations, where owners thought only African slaves could work during during hot, humid summer months. Slavery had been on the verge of dying out at the end of the 1700s, but cotton helped it survive and become a leading moral issue contributing to the civil war between the North and South from 1861 to 1865.

Later, Whitney's system of manufacturing identical parts enabled the efficient production of thousands of rifles, thereby contributing to the victory of the Union (that of the Northern states) in the U.S. Civil War. The system became central to the industrialization of the American economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Childhood and youth

Eli Whitney was born on a farm near Westborough, Massachusetts, in 1765, the oldest of four children of Eli and Elizabeth Whitney. He was born just at the time the Industrial Revolution was beginning to make an impact in England. Like all farmers in the late 1700s, Eli's father had a workshop where he used to make implements for the farm, as well as furniture for the house. There were no factories in America at the time, nor was it possible to go to stores to buy most things a farmer needed.

The life of a child in colonial America was not easy. When he was five, his mother fell ill and Eli was expected to help with chores around the house. In the winter, he tended to sixty head of cattle before walking across a mile of snow-covered fields to attend Westborough's one-room school. When he was twelve, his mother died, and Eli had to take on even more responsibility in running the household.

From an early age, Eli was proficient with his hands, working in his father's shop. He became adept at taking apart watches or clocks and repairing them for neighbors, and he learned to repair violins, or make them from scratch. (Colonists had to supply their own entertainment, and the violin, or fiddle, was often the only source of music.) He also made nails, knives, and walking canes.

Yale and beyond

At age nineteen, Whitney was eager to explore the world outside the tiny town of Westborough and was determined to attend Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, a school for wealthy young men aiming for a career in law or the ministry. Whitney was not especially interested in these careers, but he was determined to attend Yale.

His father did not have the money to pay the full tuition at Yale, so Whitney got a job as a schoolmaster in the nearby town of Grafton. In Whitney's day, learning to write also meant learning to make one's own pen (from a goose quill), which was one of the skills that Whitney taught. He finally entered Yale in 1789, at age twenty-four. He graduated three years later, in 1792, educated but unemployed. Since none of the career choices typically pursued by Yale graduates appealed to Whitney, he decided to return to his earlier profession, teaching.

Whitney found a job as a tutor on a plantation and traveled by packet boat (a small passenger ship that also carries freight and mail, usually along the coastline) to Savannah, Georgia. Traveling with him was another alumnus of Yale, Phineas Miller. When Whitney arrived in Savannah to take up his tutoring job, he was told that the promised pay had been cut in half. Disgusted, Whitney refused to take the job.

His traveling companion, Miller, recommended Whitney as a man of both education and mechanical ability who would be a valuable addition to the staff of his employer, Catherine Greene, the widow of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene (1742–1786).

Plantation shoptalk

One evening in the spring of 1793, a group of plantation owners was gathered at the Greene mansion discussing their dismal prospects. Their main crop, tobacco, had depleted the soil. The soil in Georgia was suitable for growing cotton, but only a variety of cotton that had very short fibers and sticky, green seeds in each boll. Picking the seeds from the cotton bolls was time-consuming work for a slave, an expense that hurt the profitability of growing cotton.

Catherine Greene pointed to Whitney for an answer. "He can build anything," she said, recommending that Whitney turn his attention to making a machine that could extract the seeds from cotton bolls.

Whitney set to work. In a few months he had built the first model of what he called a "cotton gin." Whitney's machine was not terribly complex. A sieve-like arrangement of wires held the cotton boll, while a rotating drum covered with hooks tugged the lint out of the boll. A brush then whisked the lint off the hooks on the drum.

Whitney's first demonstration, to a few of Catherine Greene's neighbors, was an immediate success. In one hour Whitney turned out as much seed-free cotton lint as several workers could create in a single day. He boasted that one person using a gin could do the work of ten people without one, and that if the gin were powered by water or horsepower, one worker could do the work of fifty.

With no more than a brief demonstration, the plantation owners reacted quickly. The men who saw the demonstration ordered whole fields planted with cottonseed. Word spread rapidly, and soon more cotton had been planted than Whitney could have ginned in a year.

In the meantime, Whitney returned north to obtain a patent on his machine and to plan for production, leaving his friend and business partner Phineas Miller behind to address the issue of raising revenue from the invention. (A patent is an exclusive right officially granted by a government to an inventor to make or sell an invention. Others who want to legally use the idea need to pay for the right to do so.)

A brilliant way of not making money

Whitney and his partner hit on a scheme to set up cotton gins and charge planters a percentage of the cotton they processed—40 percent was their proposition. Even though the cotton gin yielded large savings in the cost of removing the seeds, most planters thought Whitney's proposal was much too expensive.

As Whitney encountered delays setting up production to make a large number of gins for sale, many planters copied his idea, putting together their own versions of Whitney's patented invention and set to ginning cotton—without paying anything to Whitney and Miller. At least three hundred copies of the cotton gin had been made by 1797, even while Whitney struggled back in Connecticut to set up a factory with specialized tools to manufacture his device.

Whitney and Miller went to court repeatedly to protect Whitney's patent. But filing lawsuits was time-consuming and expensive. In the meantime, more and more illegal copies of the gin were produced, supporting a dramatic rise in cotton production throughout the South. Although Whitney and Miller succeeded in some suits, the monetary awards were often less than the cost of filing the suit in the first place.

The two inventors tried another approach in 1801, licensing the gin to entire states which could then authorize planters to legally copy the design. This approach eventually earned the partners about $90,000, which was a large sum in the early nineteenth century—but not enough to make either man wealthy.

As a financial proposition for Whitney, the cotton gin was a failure. The costs he incurred in pursuing lawsuits for patent infringement, and for setting up a factory in New Haven, ate away most of the money he ever saw for his invention.

King cotton

For the United States, and for the South in particular, the cotton gin had an enormous impact. Cotton was easy to grow, and with the cotton gin, it was relatively easy to process.

The rapid expansion of cotton fields raised a need for more farm workers, and in the South this meant slaves. Although the United States banned the import of slaves from 1808 onward, their numbers nevertheless grew, and slavery came to be viewed as an essential ingredient to the economy of the South.

The flood of inexpensive cotton in the United States made possible by Whitney's invention resulted in a revolution in fabrics. American cotton was shipped to newly automated textile factories in both England and New England, where another development of the Industrial Revolution— automated spinning and weaving machines—was resulting in huge changes in the way cloth was manufactured. Cotton shoved its way ahead of wool, flax (linen), and silk to become the leading raw material of cloth.

Muskets to the rescue

For Whitney, the cotton gin had been the source of ruination rather than success. He was thirty-nine years old and had nothing to show for the past decade except a record of unsuccessful lawsuits. In 1804 he turned his back on the cotton gin and on the South. He returned to New Haven in search of a new project.

But, as would happen often during the Industrial Revolution, the government came to the inventor's rescue. In the 1790s many people thought that there was a risk of war, either with England or with France (those two countries were at war with one another almost constantly after the French Revolution in 1789). The United States, which remained neutral, continued to trade with both countries, which made some political leaders feel that they might be attacked. This, in turn, created a desire to improve the preparedness of the army, and this meant acquiring many more muskets (an early form of rifle).

Up to that time, the federal government had been making its own muskets in two armories, one located in Springfield, Massachusetts, not far from Whitney's birthplace, the other at Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia). The muskets of the time were handcrafted by skilled workers and as such took a long time to make. Moreover, each musket was unique; if one broke, or a part failed, there were no replacement parts on hand for a quick fix.

Whitney, desperate to find some other project to keep the workers in his New Haven factory busy, offered to produce muskets for the federal government. On June 14, 1798, he signed a contract to manufacture ten thousand muskets over twenty-eight months for a total price of $134,000. And so began the second phase of Whitney's remarkable career.

Creating the parts to make the whole

Today, Whitney's idea for mass production techniques and the interchangeability of manufacturing parts seems obvious because it is now common practice. Specifically, Whitney resolved to make identical parts of muskets, which could be assembled into what would be ten thousand identical muskets. Extra parts could be made to replace any that broke or failed.

To succeed, the parts of a musket needed to fit together exactly, which meant that each part needed to be truly identical to the others. Most metal and wood work at the time was done by individual skilled workers. While handmade musket stocks (the wooden part that fits against the shoulder) and barrels (the long metal tube through which the bullet flies) might be very similar, such parts were, by nature, not exactly identical. This was the challenge faced by Whitney.

Making the tools to make the tools

Another aspect of Whitney's challenge was the lack of skilled workers at the time. He instead devised a system of manufacturing that would employ unskilled laborers using "machine tools," tools devised to manufacture machines.

An easy way to envision Whitney's system is to think of a pattern for a dress. A pattern is put up against the material, and scissors are guided exactly around the edge of the pattern. No matter how many times this is done, the material that is cut out will be the same shape as every other piece of material cut out from the same pattern.

The process of making a musket from wood and iron parts was a bit more complex, partly because it is harder to cut and shape wood and iron than it is to cut out fabric. Whitney spent months designing and making a series of patterns, or templates, and devices that could automate the process. The tools designed by Whitney had to be relatively easy to operate by unskilled workers.

Whitney soon fell behind the established schedule. After two years, he still had not delivered any muskets. He applied for, and received, one extension after another. In the end, it took him almost eight years to fill the entire order of ten thousand guns. But shortly thereafter, in 1811, Whitney got another contract to produce fifteen thousand more muskets, which he manufactured within just two years, thereby proving the success of his system. The War of 1812 assured Whitney's success by yielding yet more contracts.

Whitney did not invent the idea of using interchangeable or standardized parts. Other people in the United States and the world were hard at work inventing labor-saving technology. However, Whitney was one of the first to carry out and perfect what came to be called "the interchangeable system" of manufacturing. This important contribution puts him at the forefront of the growth of American industry.

Getting personal

For a quarter of a century, Whitney had devoted himself to his business. Although he had friends and family, he spent the majority of his time working and thus had little time for a personal life. Finally, in 1817, at the age of fifty-one, Whitney married Henrietta Edwards. Three years later, Whitney's only son, also named Eli, was born. Over the next eight years, the couple would have four children, the youngest of which died while still a baby.

After 1820, when Whitney began to suffer from poor health, his nephews were left to operate his factory until his son, Eli Whitney III, was old enough to assume responsibility. Whitney died in New Haven, Connecticut, on January 8, 1825.