Eli Whitney, (born December 8, 1765, Westboro, Massachusetts [U.S.]—died January 8, 1825, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.), American inventor, mechanical engineer, and producer, greatest remembered because the inventor of the cotton gin however most necessary for creating the idea of mass manufacturing of interchangeable elements.
Whitney’s father was a revered farmer who served as a justice of the peace. In May 1789 Whitney entered Yale College, the place he realized most of the new ideas and experiments in science and the utilized arts, as expertise was then referred to as. After commencement within the fall of 1792, Whitney was dissatisfied twice in promised educating posts. The second supply was in Georgia, the place, stranded with out employment, in need of money, and much from dwelling, he was befriended by Catherine Greene. Phineas Miller, a younger man of Whitney’s age, Connecticut-born and Yale-educated, managed Mulberry Grove, Greene’s splendid plantation. Miller and Whitney turned mates.
At a time when English mills have been hungry for cotton, the South exported a small quantity of the black-seed, long-staple selection. Though it might simply be cleaned of its seed by passing it by a pair of rollers, its cultivation was restricted to the coast. On the opposite hand, a green-seed, short-staple selection that grew within the inside resisted cleansing; its fibre adhered to the seed. Whitney noticed {that a} machine to scrub the green-seed cotton might make the South affluent and make its inventor wealthy. He set to work and constructed a crude mannequin. Whitney’s cotton gin had 4 elements: (1) a hopper to feed the cotton into the gin; (2) a revolving cylinder studded with a whole lot of quick wire hooks, carefully set in ordered strains to match positive grooves lower in (3) a stationary breastwork that strained out the seed whereas the fibre flowed by; and (4) a clearer, which was a cylinder set with bristles, delivering the other way, that brushed the cotton from the hooks and let it fly off by its personal centrifugal power.
After perfecting his machine Whitney secured a patent (1794), and he and Miller went into enterprise manufacturing and servicing the brand new gins. However, the unwillingness of the planters to pay the service prices and the convenience with which the gins might be pirated put the companions out of enterprise by 1797.
The planters’ skill to defeat lawsuits introduced towards them by Whitney for infringement of patent rights and their mounting wealth apparently induced a way of guilt at denying the inventor any reward: in 1802 the state of South Carolina agreed to pay $50,000, half the sum requested by Miller & Whitney for the patent rights. The motion was adopted by comparable settlements with North Carolina, Tennessee, and, lastly and reluctantly, Georgia. Miller & Whitney grossed about $90,000; the companions netted virtually nothing. When Congress refused to resume the patent, which expired in 1807, Whitney concluded that “an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.” He by no means patented his later innovations, considered one of which was a milling machine.
Whitney realized a lot from his expertise. He knew his personal competence and integrity, which have been acknowledged and revered. He redirected his mechanical and entrepreneurial skills to different initiatives during which his system for manufacturing gins was relevant. In 1797 the federal government, threatened by conflict with France, solicited 40,000 muskets from non-public contractors as a result of the 2 nationwide armories had produced only one,000 muskets in three years. Twenty-six contractors bid for a complete of 30,200. Like the federal government armories, they used the traditional methodology whereby a talented workman long-established an entire musket, forming and becoming every half. Thus, every weapon was distinctive; if a component broke, its substitute needed to be particularly made.
Whitney broke with this custom with a plan to provide 10,000 muskets in two years. He designed machine instruments by which an unskilled workman made solely a specific half that conformed exactly, as precision was then measured, to a mannequin. The sum of such elements was a musket. Any half would match any musket of that design. He had grasped the idea of interchangeable elements. “The tools which I contemplate to make,” he defined, “are similar to an engraving on copper plate from which may be taken a great number of impressions perceptibly alike.”
But greater than 10 years handed earlier than Whitney delivered his 10,000 muskets. He continually needed to plead for time whereas struggling towards unexpected obstacles, similar to epidemics and delays in provides, to create a brand new system of manufacturing. Finally, he overcame many of the skepticism in 1801, when, in Washington, D.C., earlier than President-elect Thomas Jefferson and different officers, he demonstrated the results of his system: from piles of disassembled muskets they picked elements at random and assembled full muskets. They have been the witnesses on the inauguration of the American system of mass manufacturing.
In 1817 Whitney married Henrietta Edwards, granddaughter of the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. Of his 4 kids, three survived, together with Eli Whitney, Jr., who continued his father’s arms manufactory in Hamden, Connecticut.