December 8, 1765 - January 8, 1825
Birth Place : Westborough, Massachusetts
Biography
Born on December 8, 1765 in Westborough, Massachusetts, the son of a farmer, Whitney graduated from Yale College in 1792, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. On January 6, 1817 he married Henrietta Edwards; they had four children. He died at New Haven, Connecticut, United States on January 8, 1825.
Cotton gin
Whitney is credited with creating the first cotton gin in 1793 . His business partner was Phineas Miller. The cotton gin is a mechanical device which removed the seeds from cotton, a process which until that time had been extremely labor-intensive. The cotton gin was a wooden drum stuck with hooks. As it turned, the hooks pulled the cotton fibers through a mesh. The seeds would not fit through the mesh and fell outside. The cotton gin could generate up to fifty pounds of cleaned cotton daily. This contributed to the economic development of the Southern states of the United States, a prime cotton growing area; some historians believe that this invention allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable at a critical point in its development.
Whitney received a patent (numbered X72) for his cotton gin on March 14, 1794, however, it was not validated until 1807. Whitney and Miller charged farmers an expensive price for doing the ginning for them. Two-fifths of the profits paid in cotton. Farmers were not happy with this fee. While his ideas were innovative and useful, they reproduced so easily that the concepts and designs were readily duplicated by others, claiming this was their new invention. Whitney's company that produced cotton gins went out of business in 1797.
Other Inventions
In 1798 Whitney invented a way to manufacture muskets by machine so that the parts were interchangeable. With this invention of manufacturing muskets, Eli Whitney became rich. Whitney received a government contract to make 10,000 muskets. The concept of interchangeable parts – identical components of a larger mechanism that could easily be swapped or replaced – actually had longer lasting effects than the cotton gin, in large part enabling the boom of cheap mass production that began in the late nineteenth century. However, the use of interchangeable parts in gun manufacture actually predates Whitney; the French military used such a system in the final years of the Ancien Régime. It is said that that Eli Whitney’s greatest contribution to the American Industry was the development and implementation of the American System of manufacturing and the assembly line, which he was the first to use while he was producing muskets for the U.S. Government.
Articles source : WikiPedia
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