Another Androsphere Blog: Men of Yore: Eli Whitney

This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity.

Eli Whitney

Whitney was born in Westboro, Massachusetts in 1765. As a child, he showed an instinct and talent for machinery. He worked as a blacksmith, and invented a nail-making machine. Whitney's dream of attending Yale College was frustrated for some years, because no college then taught or much appreciated the "useful arts." But Whitney did attend Yale, and graduated at the age of 27, only to find that there were no jobs for engineers either. So he accepted a teaching position in South Carolina.

En route, in early 1793, Whitney was befriended by Katherine Greene, the widow of a Revolutionary War general. When Whitney's teaching job later fell through, Greene invited him to stay at her plantation, Mulberry Grove, where she thought he might make himself helpful. As Whitney soon discovered, most cotton plantations were then on the brink of insolvency, because "green seed" cotton, the only strain that would grow inland, took too long to cull from its seeds. To sift out a single "point" of cotton lint from its surrounding seeds required ten hard hours of hand labor.

Everyone agreed that the solution was a machine to do this work; but no one had been able to make one. According to legend, within ten days of his arrival Whitney had observed the manual process and built a machine that did the same thing much faster. It is clear that his very first model did not work. In it, the bulk cotton was pressed against a wire screen, which held back the seeds while wooden teeth jutting out from an adjacent rotating drum teased the cotton fibers out through the mesh. This model invariably jammed. The next version was a complete success, thanks to thin wire hooks replacing the wooden teeth, and a moving brush that constantly cleared away the collected fibers.

By all accounts, Greene encouraged Whitney. The vexed question is whether the key element, the wire hooks, was his idea or hers. Greene supporters cite the claim of a friend of a friend of her plantation foreman, that Greene invoked "a woman's wit" and told Whitney to replace his wooden pegs with the wires of a fireplace cleaning brush. Whitney supporters cite a letter to the editor of Southern Agriculturalist magazine, whose author heard from admittedly shadowy sources that Whitney had explicitly asked Greene for a pin to experiment with at the start of his efforts. (Note that for some time during his Massachusetts days, Whitney had been the New World's sole manufacturer of hatpins.)

Whatever the comparative contributions, the cotton gin ("gin" is simply short for "engine") was a stupendous success. After Whitney gave a one-hour demonstration, in which the machine did the day's work of many men, farmers raced to sow their fields with green seed cotton. As the cotton grew, Whitney's workshop was broken into and his machine was examined in detail: soon, copies were everywhere. Whitney could not possibly have manufactured one tenth of the gins that that first crop would require; but it is nonetheless unfair that his patent (granted in 1794) guaranteed him only ten years of legal battles, which ended in penury.

In 1804, Whitney left the South forever, disappointed and disgusted. In his words, "An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor." In fact, Whitney never attempted to patent any of his later inventions (for example, a milling machine). But after settling in New Haven, Connecticut, Whitney re-invented American manufacturing as a whole, through mass production.

Whitney wanted to enable unskilled laborers to make complex products. He managed this by designing products (his test case was rifles) with interchangeable parts. These were cut and shaped by machines that each performed one precise function over and over again. The workers would merely put each machine through its motions.

Mass production is not a romantic notion. But it allowed for an unprecedented boom in American industry, and eventually provided employment for thousands of workers who were unwilling or unable to acquire apprenticeships in skilled crafts. And by all accounts, Eli Whitney himself treated his "manufactory" workers with appreciation and respect: the awful abuses of laborers that came about after his death in 1825 were a perversion of his system.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/whitney.html

Here's one of the men who allowed mass-production to really take off, which allowed manufactured goods to be produced cheaply and easily, thus making even the most complicated item available to the less well off. Mass production, despite its bad reputation as a dehumanizing paradigm is actually a great democratizer, because it means that all kinds of goods are available to all kinds of people, not just the elite. To give you an example, in 1850 USA prior to mass-production a pair a trousers would have cost roughly 2-3 weeks labour (source), but now they can be acquired for merely a few hours of labour. Not only does that advantage of making products cheaper apply to consumer goods (which some may argue are unnecessary) but also to essential products like medicines, construction materials, foodstuffs etc. These are all products which allow us to live comfortable lives with reduced risk of disease & sickness. These are products that are dependent on the process of mass-production, a process which wouldn't have happened without men like Eli Whitney doing what he wanted, doing his will.

Check out some of the other entries from the 'Men of Yore' series:

Karl Benz
Henry Bessemer

David Thompson
Malcom MacLean
Sir Richard Francs Burton
Robert Stevenson
Pierre-Paul Riquet