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 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.
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, 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 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 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 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
in 1793 to 93 million pounds 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 suggests that Whitney was among a group of
contemporaries all developing milling machines at about the same time, and that the others
were more important to the innovation than Whitney was. 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, 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. See also
Whitney family
References
Further reading
External links The Eli Whitney Museum
Eli Whitney Biography on at Whitney Research Group
Inventor of the Week: Eli Whitney Entry in New Georgia Encyclopedia
Texts on Wikisource: "Whitney, Eli". Collier's New Encyclopedia.
1921. "Whitney, Eli". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
"Whitney, Eli". Encyclopædia Britannica. 1911.
"Whitney, Eli". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
"Whitney, Eli". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1889.
"Whitney, Eli". The American Cyclopædia. 1879.
Letter from Eli Whitney to his Father regarding his invention of the cotton gin, September
11, 1793 Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Eli Whitney,
Jr. regarding his cotton gin patent, November 16, 1793
Obituary for Eli Whitney, in Niles Weekly Register, January 25, 1825