After Eli Whitney

After Eli Whitney’s death in 1825, his nephews Philos Blake (1791-1871) and Eli Whitney Blake (1795-1886) took over the operations of the Armory. Whitney had supported the Blake brothers in their education and invited them to help him run the Armory starting in the 1810s.

The Blake brothers were also inventors in their own right: they created the first American mortice lock together in 1833, E.W. Blake patented a machine to crush stone for roads in 1858, and Philos Blake patented the first modern corkscrew in 1860. The Blakes left the Armory in 1835 to set up their lock-manufacturing firm, Blake Brothers, which pioneered New Haven’s architectural fittings industry.

Eli Whitney’s own son Eli Whitney Jr. was born in November 1820 and was only four years old when his father died. In 1841, he completed his education at Princeton and returned to New Haven to take over the Armory, which had been languishing after his father’s death and his cousins’ departure. He secured a government contract for over 20,000 rifles and also began manufacturing guns for the civilian market. In 1843, he collaborated with Samuel Colt to produce the first Colt Revolvers. Once that contract had ended, the Whitney works continued to produce their own successful line of handguns.

Under Whitney Jr., the Armory site was to meet the demands of contemporary manufacturing, including the introduction of steam power and the use of steel. This included the construction of a new main Armory building in 1860 after an explosion razed the original structure.

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