Windows on the Works
Industry on the Eli Whitney Site
by: Karyl Lee Kibler Hall and Carolyn Cooper
Eli Whitney
Part One
When Eli Whitney was born in Westborough, Worcester County, Massachusetts, in 1765, a logical guess about his future course might have seen him tilling the family farm, as his ancestors had done for generations. Instead, he left his native state and became a leading member of the ruling hierarchy of another community, where he played an active role in the economic development of his country and gained renown as one of its leading technological innovators. The reasons why these developments in one man's life occurred - or, for that matter, were even possible - points to an examination of America at the end of the eighteenth century. For it is against the yardstick of opportunities within that changing society that the scope of Whitney's achievements must be measured.
The last decades of the eighteenth century were both the best and the worst of times. For those who hoped to follow ancestral paths, times were hard, as New England was undergoing a major economic and social crisis.1 Since the 1630s, the region's farmers had divided their estates and their towns' common lands among their many sons. And by the 1760s, land had run out in the older settlements. Once evenly divided, farms by Whitney's time were left to youngest sons who, in exchange for their patrimony, took care of their mothers and fathers in their old age.2 The older boys were apprenticed to craftsmen or merchants or - if resources permitted - were sent to college to become ministers, physicians, or lawyers. But by the 1780s, when Whitney came of age, the crafts were overcrowded with landless farmers' sons. And the professions were so overburdened with aspirants that only those with important family connections or who could count on inheriting a practice from an older relative, could reasonably hope for successful careers.3
At the same time, the 1780s and 90s were years of almost boundless opportunity. For those willing to tread the paths less taken, there were both great risks and great rewards. Thousands of families from Connecticut and Massachusetts began moving westward to up-state New York and the newly-opened Northwest Territory to lay out farms and towns in the fertile wilderness. And restless young merchants and professionals sought their fortunes in both the larger cities of New York and Philadelphia and in the less developed towns of the South and West. Some prospered, but many failed.
For a young man of Eli Whitney's circumstances and abilities, the choices presented by the post-Revolutionary years were particularly difficult. His circumstances were modest: his father did not have the resources to buy him a farm in the West or to purchase him an apprenticeship in Worcester or Boston. In any event, his labor was needed on the family farm. At the same time, Whitney clearly possessed unusual mechanical abilities. When he was fifteen, he persuaded his father to purchase for him the tools necessary for making common nails — items which were scarce and valuable in colonial New England. He became a proficient nail-maker, "with much profit to his father for two winters, pursuing the ordinary labors of the farm during the summers."4 Later, he became adept at fabricating lady's hat pins and walking sticks. But living at home while farming and tinkering brought him no closer to a real career.
At the age of nineteen, Whitney began to look on a college education as a way out of Westborough and out of dependence on his father. But Eli Whitney, Sr., was unwilling to part with his clever and hard-working son; his step-mother was averse to permitting the diversion of family funds to further the fortune of a child not her own; and the elder Whitney's neighbors assured him that Eli's "fine mechanical genius" would be wasted by a college education.5 Still, Whitney was steadfast in his ambition. He continued to help on the farm, while also teaching in the village school and turning his mechanical talents to profit. Within four years, at the age of twenty-three, he had saved enough money to convince his father of the sincerity of his ambitions and to obtain his blessing for a venture into liberal education. In the summer of 1788, Eli Whitney set off for Durham, Connecticut, to prepare for Yale under the tutelage of the Rev. Elizur Goodrich.
Whitney's choice of Goodrich as a teacher and sponsor for his admission to Yale was particularly apt. For the minister was a close friend and contemporary of Yale's president, Ezra Stiles, and shared in Stiles' broad Enlightenment-informed interests in both the classics and the natural sciences.6 This openness of spirit was expressed by Yale tutor Simeon Baldwin, in his valediction from the faculty to the graduating seniors of the class of 1786:7
There is yet before you an infinite field for improvement in the Arts & Sciences. They are many of them far from that perfection to which thereafter they will doubtless be brought. Those improvements depend much upon the speculations and researches of philosophical Retirement — should the (Genius of any of you turn your attention to any part of this field, we doubt not but you may be of essential service to Mankind — Many branches of Philosophy even at the Present Day are but little understood. The application of the accuracy of Mathematics to the works of Nature & of Art is capable of being much extended and new Discoveries in the vast Immensity of the Creation are continually being made. In short, the infinite fields of Nature & of Art are both before you — One would think it impossible for the human mind to be inactive, when so much Business is crowded upon it; & so much Glory attended the performance.
Baldwin, like his mentors Stiles and Goodrich, did not expect the educated to restrict their energies to classical learning. They saw all fields - teaching, writing, agriculture, and manufacturing - as depending for their development "upon the enterprise & exertions of Men of liberal sentiments." Thus encouraged, Eli Whitney applied himself to his Latin and Greek and was accepted at Yale as a freshman in May of 1789.
Yale's curriculum in the 1790s devoted little attention to mathematics and natural philosophy. But because of Stiles' interests, there was considerable extracurricular scientific activity. The college library, as well as the collections of the student societies, contained much of interest to Whitney. And life at the college even presented him with opportunities to exercise his mechanical skills. When the "philosophical apparatus" used in demonstrating the principles of physics broke, the faculty prepared to send it to Europe for repair. Whitney offered to fix it:8
A carpenter being at work upon one of the buildings of the gentleman with whom Whitney boarded, the latter begged permission to use his tools during the intervals of study; but the mechanic being a man of careful habits, was unwilling to trust them with a student, it was only after the gentleman of the house had become responsible for all damages, that he would grant permission. But Mr. Whitney had no sooner commenced his operations, than the carpenter was surprised at his dexterity, and exclaimed, "there was one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college."
But the most important thing Yale provided Whitney was contact with men of consequence. The college degree, at a time when the credential was only possessed by a few, gave him entry to alumni who were powerful figures in commerce, politics, and law. His contacts among his fellow undergraduates would also prove significant. Although the new nation's largest college, Yale was still a small place, its undergraduate enrollment numbering about two hundred in Whitney's time. Everyone knew and took the measure of everyone else during their "shortest gladdest years" together. And Whitney's contemporaries at Yale included men who would become judges of the federal and state courts (including five members of state supreme courts), five future members of congress, and a future Secretary of War.9
After taking his degree in the fall of 1792, Whitney obtained a job as a private tutor in Georgia through the efforts of President Stiles. It is doubtful, however, that Whitney intended to pursue a teaching career; a position of this sort was a common step for those who had not yet found a vocation.10 Nor was his choice of the South as a place to go unusual. Yankees had been looking to the South as a land of opportunity since the 17608. Georgia had a notable colony of Yale graduates, including its Revolutionary War governor, Lyman Hall. And Yale alumni were running plantations, practicing law and medicine, teaching, and operating firms throughout the South.
Things did not go well for Whitney in Georgia. On his way there, he stopped in New York to be inoculated against the small-pox. Instead of the mild case of the disease that most patients suffered, Whitney became quite ill. Still not entirely recovered, he set sail for Savannah. One of his fellow-passengers was the widow of Revolutionary War hero, Nathaniel Greene, who owned a large plantation on Mulberry Grove. She invited him there to recover his health. On his arrival, however, he discovered that his job had been filled. Mrs. Greene, although a New Englander, had all the virtues of southern hospitality:11
Mrs. Greene kindly said to him, my young friend, you propose studying the law; make my house your home - your room your castle, and there pursue what studies you please. He accordingly commenced the study of the law under that hospitable roof.
Although nominally a student of the law, Whitney's mechanical interests remained active. He designed and built an embroidery frame for his hostess. Shortly thereafter, he happened to overhear a conversation among some of Mrs. Greene's fellow planters in which
they expressed great regret that there was no means of cleaning the green seed cotton, or separating it from its seed, since all the lands which were unsuitable for the cultivation of rice, would yield large crops of cotton. But until ingenuity could devise some machine which would greatly facilitate the process of cleaning, it was in vain to think of raising cotton for market. Separating one pound of the clean staple from the seed was a day's work for a woman.. While the company were engaged in this conversation, "gentlemen (said Mrs. Greene,) apply to my young friend Mr. Whitney — he can make any thing." She then conducted them into a neighboring room, and showed them her tambour frame, and a number of toys which Mr. Whitney had made, or repaired for the children.12
His curiosity piqued, Whitney set out to learn about cotton, which was a rather exotic commodity in North America. Cotton was native to India, where most of it was grown, and the greater part of this expensive crop was consumed by the British textile mills. Although a group of Massachusetts merchants had attempted to operate a cotton manufactory in Beverly in the late 1780s, they possessed neither the technology nor a sufficient quantity of reasonably priced cotton to make the venture successful.13 Thus, as of 1793, cotton textiles were an expensive imported luxury and most Americans dressed in homespun linen and woolen clothing.
With the assistance of Mrs. Greene's plantation manager, fellow Yale alumnus Phineas Miller (Yale 1785), Whitney set up a workshop. Since the tools and materials he needed were unavailable in Georgia, he made his own, even drawing his own wire (of which the teeth of the gin would be made). By the end of the winter of 1793, Whitney had successfully constructed his cotton gin, a machine which could separate more seed from fiber in a day "than could be done in the usual manner in the space of many months.14
His invention generated tremendous excitement in the neighborhood of Mulberry Grove. Agriculture in the region was depressed, the commodities markets glutted with rice and tobacco. The machine promised an economic revival of unparalleled proportions. Before Whitney had even formulated his plans for manufacturing the gin, planters throughout Georgia were sowing their fields with cotton in anticipation of reaping fortunes.
It was one thing to invent the cotton gin. It was quite another to manufacture it on a scale adequate to the demand - and to do so to the benefit of the inventor. Recognizing this, Whitney formed a partnership with Phineas Miller, who had the capital and legal expertise to promote and protect the new invention. Rather than selling the machines outright or licensing the patent to other manufacturers, Miller and Whitney had decided to establish ginning mills throughout the South, wherever the market demanded, in which they would retain ownership. This proved to be an unfortunate decision, for such a plan called for financial resources beyond their means. Moreover, the machine was easily copied and, because of a defect in the patent laws, it was difficult to prevent infringements. And at a time at which sectional animosities were beginning to develop, a monopoly controlled by clever Yankees was bound to arouse political opposition in the South.15 Little suspecting the difficulties that lay ahead, Whitney set forth for Connecticut in May of 1793, expecting to perfect the machine, apply for a patent, and set up a factory to manufacture it.
Whitney and Miller immediately encountered problems. Beyond the obvious difficulties of setting up the large-scale manufacture of a rather complex machine at a time when most items were still made by hand in artisans' workshops, the scarcity of essential materials such as wire, and the small supply of skilled labor, the firm encountered financial problems. Credit was extraordinarily tight: the firm's first loan in the spring of 1794 cost five percent above the legal rate of interest; by 1796, the loan brokers were charging the firm seven percent interest per month.16 Nevertheless, Miller wrote constantly to Whitney, urging him to speed up production and shipping of the machines:17
do not let a deficiency of money, do not let any thing. ..hinder the speedy construction of the Gins. The people of the country are almost running mad for them, and much can be said to justify their importunity. When the present crop is harvested, there will be a real property of at least fifty thousand, yes of a hundred thousand dollars, lying useless, unless we can enable the holders to bring it to market. Pray remember, we must have from fifty to one hundred gins between this and another fall, if there are any workmen in New England, or in the Middle States, to make them.
With planters throughout the South having crops of cotton in their fields and the Miller & Whitney gins only beginning to arrive, the incentives for patent infringement were considerable. By early 1795, two variations on Whitney's invention were on the market. In the meantime, as interest rates rose and Miller's letters became increasingly frantic, Whitney fell ill with malaria and scarlet fever. The crowning blow came in March of 1795, when his New Haven factory (located at Wooster and Chestnut Streets) burned to the ground. The firm of Miller & Whitney faced ruin.
Nevertheless, the partners continued to pursue the elusive riches promised by the cotton gin. The invention was an unquestioned success. Within three years of its creation, both the agriculture of the South and the manufacturing and commerce of the North were beginning to feel its effects, as planters committed themselves to cotton agriculture and canny northern capitalists like Moses Brown of Providence hired emigre artisans like Samuel Slater to replicate British cotton textile machinery. Whitney and Miller went from southern state to southern state, presenting their case to the legislatures and the courts and hoping to save themselves from bankruptcy. The battles went on until 1807, with mixed success. Although Whitney continued to be involved with these efforts to protect his interest in the invention, by 1797, he had clearly decided to seek his fortune in other ways and, in the fall of that year, entered into negotiations with the War Department to manufacture muskets for the fledgling federal government.
Until 1797, the federal army, such as it was, had been armed with ordnance left over from the Revolution. This might have been sufficient to its needs had not the nation become involved in the struggle between the French Revolutionary government and the more conservative powers of Europe. France had played a leading role in financing and supplying troops, arms, and naval power during our own revolution. In November of 1796, John Jay, the American special envoy to Great Britain, signed a treaty which, in effect, made us allies against the French. The French responded by refusing to receive the American ambassador and by threatening that if the United States did not loan its government a quarter of a million dollars, the result would be a declaration of war. Responding with the ringing declaration, "millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute," President John Adams ordered the Secretary of War to rearm the nation's military. And, accordingly, bids were solicited for contractors willing to manufacture 40,000 muskets. This was extraordinarily optimistic, given the fact that even the best American armorers had never produced more than 300 muskets a year.
That Whitney, who had never made a firearm, was willing to bid on this contract was a remarkable testament both to his desperation and to his self-confidence. That government officials were willing to contract with him for the manufacture of a quarter of the entire number to be made was a testament to the national reputation he had gained from his invention of the cotton gin. On January 14, 1798, he signed a contract with the War Department, promising the delivery of four thousand muskets within one year and the remaining six thousand within two years from the date of the signing. His Yale contacts proved instrumental in this matter: the Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott, was a graduate in the class of 1778; the group of New Haven merchants who cosigned the loan which made possible the purchase of the land at Mill Rock and the construction of the factory were acquaintances that he had made during his student years. But promotion was one thing; the challenge of production lay before him.
Part 2
Relaying the dam and building a factory at Mill Rock took longer than expected; so did fashioning the production tools and machines that Whitney had in mind. His objective, he wrote to Oliver Colicroot in the summer of 1799, was
to form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion — which when once accomplished, will give expedition, uniformity, and exactness to the whole.18
With such tools he intended to enable men who had never been gunsmiths to produce uniform parts for assembling into the whole guns. While not absolutely original with Whitney- in 1785 Thomas Jefferson had noticed one Honore Blanc in France making muskets on this plan 19 - the idea was unfamiliar to the U.S. military authorities, and some were initially skeptical it could ever be achieved at a reasonable cost.
It took Eli Whitney ten years instead of two to complete deliveries on his 1 798 contract, but he managed to gain and maintain the confidence of the Army that his method was practicable. The functional division of labor that Whitney put into effect at his factory was also adopted at the national armories, where it was carried to greater lengths of specialization in their larger workforces. He was offered the job of Superintendent at Harpers Ferry Armory in 1806, and was asked to bring his machines and men with him to Virginia.20 He declined that position, but was active in co-operating with the national armories there and at Springfield, Massachusetts, and with other private arms factories in New England, in exchanging technological know-how in the form of information and advice and in the form of workers who were gaining on-the-job mechanical skills. Whitney was on especially good terms with Roswell Lee, a young Virginian who had worked for him before becoming the Superintendent at the Springfield Armory. When a meeting was held in 1815 of armory superintendents with Ordnance Department officials, to work out procedures for achieving inter-armory interchangeability of parts, they held the meeting with Eli Whitney, at the Whitney Armory. 21
The factory that Whitney established at Mill Rock remained in operation long after the emergency of 1798 was over, and long after the other 1798 contractors had gone out of business.22 Meanwhile, interchangeability of parts, embraced by military authorities in the early years of the century as a goal for small arms manufacture, proved to be an elusive goal to reach, even as the definition of interchangeability itself was becoming more stringent. Looking back to Eli Whitney's era from the standpoint of 1883, one expert judged that
Uniformity in gun-work was then, as now, a comparative term; but then it meant within a thirty-second of an inch or more, where now it means within half a thousandth of an inch. Then interchangeability may have signified a great deal of filing and fitting, and an uneven joint when fitted, where now it signified slipping in a piece, turning a screw-driver, and having a close, even fit.23
Not until the mid-century, a generation after Whitney's death, were the public and private armories for U.S. military small arms equipped to produce parts that were interchangeable, between factories as well as within one factory, by criteria of interchangeability that were acceptable later on.24 The system for interchangeable manufacture depended not only on precise machine tools, but also on control of production variance by inspection of the parts with accurate and standard gauges.25 American firearms and their methods of production impressed the world at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, where the expression "American System of Manufactures" was coined.26
The machines and production methods used in armories were gradually adopted for the manufacture of other objects that were also made of moving metal parts: clocks and watches, sewing machines, typewriters, bicycles, and after the turn of the century, automobiles. Except for clocks and guns, these objects were nineteenth-century inventions, along with the means of manufacturing them that eventually made them inexpensive enough to appeal to a mass market. The profound changes in American technology and manufacturing methods that are summed up in the term "industrialization" were complex, and spread over the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but in popular history, Eli Whitney became the symbol of those changes. He became a heroic figure in a creation myth, the prototypical ingenious Yankee who was credited with doing everything single handedly that actually took many people in different locations several generations to accomplish. In the larger-than-life portrayal of Eli Whitney as progenitor of modern manufacturing industry, he was depicted as the first person ever to think of manufacturing by assembly of interchangeable parts, who had produced by his method muskets whose parts were interchangeable, using machines of advanced design, including specifically his own invention, the milling machine.
Like many heroic figures in history, Eli Whitney has undergone a debunking by historians who in the last 25 years have been looking closely into various aspects of his myth. The debunking began in 1960 with the publication of an article by machine-tool historian Robert S. Woodbury, on "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts.27 Woodbury pointed out that Honoré Blanc's manufacturing methods in France preceded Whitney's by some years, and, as scattered firearms collectors had probably already noticed, that the parts of muskets produced by Eli Whitney, Sr. do not interchange, so Whitney should be credited neither with inventing the concept of interchangeability nor with achieving it in practice. Six years later, Smithsonian curator Edwin Battison published the results of his detailed look at lock parts of two pre-1825 Whitney muskets, which showed marks of two kinds of "milling" but not of the kind performed by a "true milling machine. "28 He also put forth evidence for the use of a true milling machine at an arms factory in Middletown, Connecticut prior to the use of the very old extant "Whitney" milling machine at Whitney's Armory, and concluded that Whitney could not have been the inventor of the milling machine. Research by other scholars since the 1960s has brought out the fact that interchange-ability for muskets or rifles was not attained by other arms manufacturers of Eli Whitney's day either, with the important but ephemeral exception in the 1820s of John Hall's patent breech loading rifles, which were of non-standard design.29
The revisionist articles by Woodbury and Battison in the 1960s effectively demolished the Whitney myth among historians of technology. Curiously enough, some of them have been building up a species of counter-myth, by going further and calling Eli Whitney a charlatan who was purposely deceiving the government about his achievements. As historians outgrow and reject the "great man" theory of history (and also the great villain theory), they are increasingly asking questions about the daily life of ordinary people in the past. Since ordinary people usually neglected to write down ordinary facts about their lives and work - facts they took for granted - it is important to look to their remaining material culture in order to learn what the written records do not reveal about their ever-changing material milieu in the past. Managers and mechanics alike worked to manufacture firearms at the Whitney Armory for 90 years during America's "industrial revolution." The Whitney Armory site today should not be regarded as a memorial to a myth, but as a material remnant of the past from which to learn not only about the arms that ordinary Americans carried with them westward across the continent in the nineteenth century, but also about what was actually happening inside the factories that were producing those arms.
Notes
1 Philip Greven, Four Generations: Family, Land, and Population in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 41-71.
2 On ultimogeniture, see John J. Waters, "Patrimony, Succession, and Social Stability in Eighteenth Century Guilford, Connecticut," Perspectives
