Young Eli quickly learned how the marketplace worked, and diversified into hatpins and canes. It was his genius to observe what people needed, and to provide it. There he saw how hard it was to separate the green seeds from short-staple cotton.
In just a few days in , he invented a machine that could do the task ten times faster than a slave doing the work by hand. The cotton gin revolutionized agriculture. It also made possible the cotton economy of the American South, perpetuating and increasing the practice of slavery upon which the agricultural system depended. Growing textile mills in New England and Europe became eager buyers of Southern cotton.
After the introduction of the gin, U. The cotton gin significantly bolstered the African slave trade. In fact, the gin made growing cotton so profitable that growers enslaved more people.
According to many historians, the invention of the gin made growing cotton with the stolen labor of enslaved people a highly profitable undertaking that became the primary source of wealth in the American South and helped drive westward expansion from Georgia to Texas.
By the late s, legal fees from patent fights and a fire that destroyed his cotton gin factory had left Whitney on the verge of bankruptcy. However, inventing the cotton gin had earned him a reputation for ingenuity and mechanical expertise which he would soon apply to a major government project.
In , the U. The reason for this slow pace was the conventional method of arms production, in which every part of every musket was handmade by a single gunsmith. Since each weapon was unique, replacement parts had to be specially made—a time-consuming and costly process.
To speed up production, the War Department solicited bids from private contractors for the manufacture of 10, muskets. Eli Whitney had never built a gun in his life, but he won the government contract by proposing to deliver all 10, muskets in just two years. To accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, he proposed inventing new machine tools that would enable unskilled workers to make identical individual parts of each particular musket model.
Since any part would fit any musket, repairs could be made quickly in the field. To build the muskets, Whitney built an entire town called Whitneyville, located in the present-day Hamden, Connecticut. At the center of Whitneyville was the Whitney Armory. By January , Whitney had failed to deliver a single gun. He was summoned to Washington to justify his continued use of government funds. In a storied display, Whitney reportedly amazed outgoing President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson by assembling several working muskets from a random selection of parts.
It was later proven that Whitney had actually marked the correct musket parts beforehand. Ultimately, it took Whitney ten years to deliver the 10, muskets he had contracted to deliver in two. He is credited for one of the first demonstrations of total cost accounting and economic efficiency in manufacturing.
Even earlier, English naval engineer Samuel Bentham originated the use of standardized parts in wooden pulleys for raising and lowering sails. Until middle age, Whitney put much of his personal life, including marriage and family, on hold. His work had been his life. In a series of letters to his old patron, Catherine Greene, Whitney revealed his feelings of isolation and loneliness. In , at age 52, Whitney moved to recapture his personal life when he married year-old Henrietta Edwards.
Henrietta was a granddaughter of famed evangelist Jonathan Edwards and daughter of Pierpont Edwards, then the head of the Connecticut Democratic Party. Eli Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8, , just a month after his 59th birthday. Though plagued by the pain of his illness, Whitney studied human anatomy with his doctors and invented a new type of catheter and other devices to help ease his pain. In his final days, Whitney sketched designs for improved tools for making lock parts.
The foundation of the building where his first operating cotton gin was erected still stands on the grounds of the old Mulberry Grove plantation in Port Wentworth, Georgia. His cotton gin revolutionized agriculture in the South, but made the region even more dependent on stolen labor of enslaved people. At the same time, his advances in more efficient manufacturing methods helped the North grow its wealth and status as an industrial power.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Connecticut Historical Society. Green, Constance McLaughlin. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. Boston: Little, Brown, Cooper, Carolyn, and Merrill Lindsay.
Eli Whitney and the Whitney Armory. Olmsted, Denison. Memoir of the Life of Eli Whitney, Esq. Woodbury, Robert S. Mirsky, Jeannette, and Allan Nevins.
0コメント