Search
The Whitneys
The inventor Eli Whitney, Sr. is known for two innovations that had major impacts on American history: the cotton gin and the promotion of interchangeable parts in industrial production.
Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts in 1765 and graduated from Yale College in 1792. After graduation he traveled to Georgia, where he learned about the slow process of removing seeds from cotton fibers. At the time, this work was done by hand by enslaved workers.
Whitney soon invented a machine that could do the work much more efficiently: the cotton gin. The machine was a success, leading to a boom in cotton agriculture and manufacture as well as an expansion of the violent systems of plantation enslavement.
However, the rapid copying of the cotton gin by other makers meant that Whitney did not benefit from his machine’s success. After the cotton gin factory he built in New Haven burned down in 1795, he looked to other projects. In 1798, he secured a contract from the United States government to manufacture 10,000 muskets, and established an armory at a site between New Haven and Hamden on the Mill River.
Precision Manufacturing at the Armory
At the end of the 1700s, gun making was still a handcraft. It required skilled labor by individual artisans who could make and assemble every part of the gun mechanism. Guns were custom objects, no two exactly alike.
Eli Whitney wanted to create a manufacturing system using industrially-produced, identical parts that could be assembled into guns by everyday laborers. This concept was known as “interchangeable parts.” Each part would be manufactured to a precise standard and could then be switched out (interchanged) with its corresponding part on any other gun.
While Eli Whitney is often associated with the creation of interchangeable parts and the milling machines that made precision manufacturing possible, he was not the inventor of either system, nor did he work alone. Rather, he was part of a large group of inventors, manufacturers, and laborers who were all working towards similar goals in the first decades of the 1800s. He often exchanged ideas with other industrialists and inventors. Laborers also moved between the Whitney Armory and other factories like Simeon North’s Armory in Middletown, Connecticut, bringing ideas and techniques with them.
Whitney’s plan to use interchangeable parts to manufacture guns was not a total success in his lifetime. However, the systems developed at the Whitney Armory and other Connecticut factories in the early nineteenth century led to the development of true interchangeable parts, one of the major innovations of the industrial revolution.
Eli Whitney died in 1825. After his death, his nephews, son, and later owners of the site continued to pursue his legacy of industrial innovation and invention until the last factory on the site closed in 1979.
Learn More:
The Armory & Legacy
After Eli Whitney
Key Terms
Armory: A place where guns are made.
Interchangeable parts: Standardized, identical parts that can be exchanged for each other, streamlining manufacture and repair.
Precision manufacturing: The production of parts with sizes and shapes that match exactly