Eli Whitney Essay Research Paper Eli WhitneyThe

Eli Whitney Essay, Research Paper

Eli Whitney

The Gin. The Guns. The Legend.

By Mike Klage

Honors English 11

Mrs. Wiehe

Eli.s Early Life

Eli Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, to Eli Sr. and Elizabeth Whitney. (Whitney) At the age of 12, Elizabeth dies, leaving behind Eli and 2 other children. This combined with having a stepmother within two years of his mother.s death greatly effected Eli.s childhood. During the Revolutionary War, Eli started his first job. He decided to make nails, due to their demand at the time. (Eberius) This was only a sign of what was to come in his life. Eli had strong urges to attend Yale, despite the fact he was not going into the professions or theology or law, which the majority of Yale attendees did at that time. To pay his way through Yale, he taught to the side. He struggled those years with money, but at the age of 27, Whitney did graduate. (He can.) After graduating, Eli was offered a teaching position in South Carolina. On his trip, his ship wrecked, he got smallpox, and he ended up at the plantation of Catherine Greene. This was where it all began. (Eberius)

The Cotton Gin

Up to this point, the only major cash crops of the south were tobacco, rice, and indigo. As far as cotton goes, coastal islands grew long staple cotton, and made a decent profit off of it, but the long staple variety does not grow in the majority of the south. Short staple cotton was grown, but not in large portions due to its tedious cleaning process. For every four pounds of cotton plant picked, only one pound would actually be cotton fiber, the rest being seeds. (Bachman) This made cotton virtually pointless to grow from a financial perspective. After being informed about the problem, Eli started working on a machine to fix this. It only took Whitney six months to have a working prototype. This prototype cleaned the short staple cotton ten times faster, and did a more thorough job of doing it, that cleaning by hand. (Schapsmeier) Finally, growing cotton had a possibility of being a profitable industry. To start making money on his invention, Whitney applied for a patent, and started the company of Miller and Whitney. .Miller. was Phineas Miller, the manager of the Greene Plantation. The deal was that Whitney would go back north to New Haven, Connecticut, to start a factory to make the gins, while Miller stayed in the south to market and install the gins. (He can.)

Miller and Whitney had several problems from the beginning, both in the north and in the south. First, the factory in New Haven burnt down, destroying twenty complete gins and the machinery to make more. In the south, people began to pirate Whitney.s idea when harvest time came around and the gins were not available yet. Once they were available, they became harder to sell, because Miller got caught in a land speculation deal, which hurt his (and likewise the company.s) reputation. There were also problems with the states recognizing Whitney.s patent on the gin. Throughout its existence, Miller and Whitney struggled with debt and bankruptcy, and eventually went under, even though the company.s only product was one of the greatest inventions of the time. When all was said and done, Miller and Whitney only took in about 90,000 dollars, most of which was used to cover court costs and supplies. (He can.) This small sum was despite the fact that cotton production in the south jumped from 138,000 pounds in 1792, one year before the cotton gin, to 17,000,000 pounds in 1800, only eight years later. (Bachman) Whitney probably only earned several thousand dollars for inventing the cotton gin, so the main thing Eli Whitney gained from the cotton gin was pride, and making his name known, which will help him in future years. (Schapsmeier)

Interchangeable Parts

After early successes inventing, but major failures when it comes to money resulting from inventions, Eli started looking for an invention which would bring in more money. He turned to the United States government. Up until this point, guns had to be made one at a time, by an expert craftsmen. This process was long and tedious. It required making each gun one piece at a time, from stock to barrel. This process was so slow, that in three years, the federal arsenal had turned out only one thousand guns. (Eberius)

This was where Whitney came in. He proposed a radical new idea to mass produce guns. It was called interchangeable parts. This meant that he would use machines to make multiple copies of each piece of a gun, all so closely the same that they would all fit together in any combination with any other parts. This served many purposes, and solved many problems at once. One major problem solved was that when a gun was broken in the field, it didn.t have to be sent back to a gunsmith to be fixed. The gun could be fixed in no time at all because they would just take an extra part that was already made to fit. This saved time, and allowed guns to be functional a higher percentage of the time. Next, it allowed the guns to be made by people other than gunsmiths. The interchangeable parts method divided producing a gun into around one hundred small simple steps. These steps could be done by anyone, not just a gunsmith. This way, people who were not skilled gunsmiths could make guns that were in fact superior to guns made by mas