Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest child of Eli Whitney Sr., a prosperous farmer. His mother, Elizabeth Fay of Westborough, died when he was eleven.[citation needed] At age fourteen 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 schoolteacher to save money. He prepared for Yale at Leicester Academy (now Becker College) 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 eighteenth century, Georgia was a magnet for New Englanders seeking their fortunes (its Revolutionary era governor had been Lyman Hall, a migrant from Connecticut). When he initially sailed for South Carolina, among his shipmates were the widow and family of Revolutionary hero, General 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 (Class of 1785), 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 (1793), and his advocacy of interchangeable parts. In the South, the cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was harvested and reinvigorated slavery. While in the North, the adoption of interchangeable parts revolutionized camiseta del america de cali the manufacturing industry, and in time contributed greatly to their victory in the Civil War.
Career inventions
Interchangeable parts
Main article: Interchangeable parts
Though Whitney is popularly credited with the invention of a musket that could be manufactured with interchangeable parts, the idea predated him. The idea is credited to Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, a French artillerist, and credits for finally perfecting the "armory system," or American system of manufacturing, is given by historian Merritt Roe Smith to Captain John H. Hall and by historian Diana Muir writing in Reflections in Bullough's Pond to Simeon North. In From the American System to Mass Production, historian David A. Hounshell
By the late 1790s, Whitney was on the verge of bankruptcy and 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 ten to fifteen thousand muskets in 1800. He had not mentioned interchangeable parts at that time. Ten months later, Treasury Secretary Wolcott sent him a "foreign pamphlet on arms manufacturing techniques," possibly one of Honor Blanc's reports, after which Whitney first began to talk about interchangeability. After spending most of 1799-1801 in cotton gin litigation, Whitney began promoting the idea of interchangeable parts, and even arranged a public demonstration of the concept in order to gain time. He did not deliver on the contract until 1809, but then spent the rest of his life publicizing the idea of interchangeability.
Whitney's defenders have claimed that he invented the American system of manufacturing -- the combination of power machinery, interchangeable parts, and division of labor that would underlie the nation's subsequent industrial revolution. While there is persuasive evidence that he failed camiseta del america de cali to achieve interchangeability, his use of power machinery and specialized division of labor are well documented . 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
Main article: Cotton gin
Cotton Gin Patent. It shows sawtooth gin blades, which were not part of Whitney's original patent.
A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum.
The cotton gin is a mechanical device which removes the seeds from cotton, a process which, until the time of its invention, had been extremely labor-intensive. The word 'gin' is actually short for engine. The cotton gin was a wooden drum stuck with hooks, which pulled the cotton fibers through a mesh. The cotton seeds would not fit through the mesh and fell outside. Whitney occasionally told a story where he was pondering an improved method of seeding the cotton and he was inspired by observing a cat attempting to pull a chicken through a fence, and could only pull through some of the feathers.
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