Eli Whitney was born on Dec. 8, 1765 in Massachusetts. As a youth he showed talent in the mechanical arts by building his own violin. He graduated from Yale in 1789 and hope to become a teacher. Things did not work out and he ended up stranded in Georgia. He was befriended by Catherine Greene, widow of Revolutionary War general Nathanael. She let him stay on her plantation called Mulberry Grove. One day, the manager complained to him about how hard it was to get the seeds out of cotton. The cotton fiber stuck to the seeds so much that a slave could only clean one pound per day. Whitney was inspired to build a machine that had a revolving cylinder with hundreds of short wire hooks that ripped the seeds out of the fiber. It was called the cotton gin with “gin” being short for engine. Now, a slave could clean 50 pounds of cotton in one day. In 1794, he received a patent and should have gotten rich. Unfortunately, the machine was easy to pirate and plantation owners would be damned if they would pay Whitney a percentage of their cotton to have it ginned by Whitney. Whitney later said “an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.” Very unfortunately, planters now had an incentive to grow a lot of cotton and they needed more slaves to pick it. Ironically, although the invention saved slaves the frustration of removing the seeds by hand, it caused a lot more slaves to be bought to pick the cotton in the fields. Whitney was no hero! He returned to Massachusetts when his business failed. In 1797, the government offered contracts to make 40,000 muskets for a possible war against France. (Previously, the two national armories had made 1,000 in three years.) That’s because it required a skilled craftsman to hand-make each musket. If a part broke, an identical part had to be hand-made. Whitney got a contract to make 10,000 muskets in two years. He had developed a process called “interchangeable parts”. Each part was made by a machine and then an unskilled worker could easily put the parts together. This was the beginning of mass production. In 1801, Whitney demonstrated the process to President Jefferson by taking parts off piles and putting together a musket. This convinced the government to retain the contract, because it took Whitney ten years to produce the 10,000. He blamed an epidemic and shortage of supplies, but part of the reason may have been Whitney taking time off for side ventures. He did get rich off making guns. Ironically, he had never owned a gun before.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eli-Whitney
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/cotton-gin-and-eli-whitney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Whitney
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