Whitney, Eli (redirected from Eli Whitney)

Whitney, Eli, 1765–1825, American inventor of the cotton gin, b. Westboro, Mass., grad. Yale, 1792. When he was staying as tutor at Mulberry Grove, the plantation of Mrs. Nathanael Greene, Whitney was encouraged by Mrs. Greene and visiting cotton planters to try to find some device by which the fiber of short-staple cotton could be rapidly separated from the seed. Whitney, whose creative mechanical bent had been evident from boyhood, completed his model gin early in 1793, after about 10 days of work, and by April had built an improved one. With Phineas Miller, Mrs. Greene's plantation manager (and later her husband), he formed a partnership to manufacture gins at New Haven. He was unable to make enough gins to meet the demand, and although the partners received a patent in 1794, others copied his model and soon many gins were in use. After much litigation the partners received (1807) a favorable decision to protect their patent, but Congress in 1812 denied Whitney's petition for its renewal. His invention, which had immense economic and social effects, brought great wealth to many others, but little to Whitney himself. In 1798 he built a firearms factory near New Haven. The muskets his workmen made by methods comparable to those of modern mass industrial production were the first to have standardized, interchangeable parts.

Bibliography

See biographies by J. Mirsky and A. Nevins (1962) and D. Olmsted (1846, repr. 1972); C. M. Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (1956).

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Whitney, Eli

(born Dec. 8, 1765, Westboro, Mass., U.S.—died Jan. 8, 1825, New Haven, Conn.) U.S. inventor, engineer, and manufacturer. He is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin (1793), which led to greatly increased production of the short-staple cotton grown in much of the South, making the region prosperous. The most important innovation credited to Whitney may be the concept of mass production of interchangeable parts. His idea of manufacturing quantities of identical parts for assembly into muskets, after undertaking in 1797 to supply the U.S. government with 10,000 muskets in two years, helped inaugurate the vastly important American System of manufacture.

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Whitney, Eli (1765–1825) inventor, engineer; born in Westboro, Mass. Whitney showed early mechanical skill, manufacturing nails at home by age 15. Determined to get an education, he taught school to pay for his way at Yale (1789–92). Moving to Savannah, Ga., to teach, he found the post filled but he was invited to stay on the plantation belonging to Gen. Nathanael Green's widow. After learning of the problems of local cotton growers, by Spring of 1793 he had developed the cotton gin for separating cotton from its seeds, a machine that could perform the work of 50 slaves. He soon ran into patent difficulties, and although he eventually won in court (1807), he profited very little from his invention. Deciding to turn to the manufacture of rifles, in 1798 he obtained a contract from the U.S. government and opened a factory near New Haven, Conn.; it was the manufacturing of firearms that led to his considerable fortune. And although now popularly associated with the cotton gin, he is actually more important for inventing machines that produced interchangeable gun parts, the basis for his reputation as the originator of mass production.