Eli Whitney was born on
December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts. He was the eldest child of Elizabeth Fay and
Eli Whitney, Sr., a prosperous farmer.
Eli (1765) was never known as “Junior” even though he was one
technically and was famous with the name “Eli Whitney.” Eli (1765) had a son whom he named Eli in
1820; his son was known during his life and after his death as “Eli Whitney,
Jr.”)
Eli Whitney (1765) was 11 years
old when his mother passed away in 1777.
By the time he was 14 he was operating “a profitable nail manufacturing
operation in his father’s workshop during the Revolutionary War. By the name he was old enough to attend
college, his father had remarried, and his stepmother opposed his desire to
attend college. He therefore worked as a
farm laborer and school teacher to earn and save enough money. He attended Leicester Academy (now Becker
College) and studied with Rev. Elizur Goodrich of Durham, Connecticut to
prepare for college. He entered Yale
with the class of 1789 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792 with the desire to
study law; however, he did not have the funding and “accepted an offer to go to
South Carolina as a private tutor.”
While on the ship bound for
South Carolina, Whitney met the widow and family of General Nathanael Green, a
hero of the Revolutionary War from Rhode Island. Mrs. Greene invited him to visit her
plantation, Mulberry Grove, in Georgia.
There he met the manager of her plantation – and her husband-to-be –
Phineas Miller, and the two men became business partners.
Whitney became “famous for two
innovations which later divided the United States in the mid-19th
century: the cotton gin (1793) 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.”
Eli Whitney is best known for
inventing the cotton gin, “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 (regardless of whether Whitney intended that or not). Despite the social and economic impact of his
invention, Whitney lost many profits in legal battles over patent infringement
for the cotton gin….”
The cotton gin is described as
“a mechanical device that removes the seeds from cotton, a process that had
previously been extremely labor-intensive.
The word ginis [is] short for engine.
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 chick 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
(later numbered as X72) 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 … 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…."
Whitney was “credited with
inventing the idea of interchangeable parts,” but “the idea predated
[him].” He had for years “championed”
interchangeable parts for muskets, but his actual “role in it was one of
promotion and popularizing, not invention.
Successful implementation of the idea eluded him 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….
“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,’ … after which Whitney
first began to talk about interchangeability.”
Short on funds because of
problems with the cotton gin, Whitney accepted a contract to produce weapons
for the government. The one-year
contract actually took eight years.
“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.”
Some historians give Whitney
credit for inventing the first milling machine while others suggest he was part
of a group of inventors with the inventions of the other inventers being “more
important to the innovation” than that of Whitney.
Even though Whitney came from
“humble origins,” he “was keenly aware of the value of social and political
connections.” He used his “status as a
Yale alumnus” gave him additional status.
He also made “contacts” through his marriage to Henrietta Edwards in
1817 in that Henrietta was the “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. This type of
connections was “essential” to business success with government contracts.
One month before he turned 59
years old, Eli Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8 1825, in New Haven,
Connecticut. He was survived by his
widow and four children. Whitney’s
likeness was put on a postage stamp in 1940.
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