Eli Whitney - The Man

ELI WHITNEY - the MAN and HIS INVENTIONS Introduction:

Eli Whitney is widely remembered in American History, primarily for his late 18th century invention of the cotton engine or "gin," as it came to be known. In retrospect, the cotton gin transformed the economic portrait of the nascent United States and may have, unintentionally established the demand for slaves in the U.S., leading the country into its most shameful period of history. Even greater is evident in Whitney's nearly simultaneous contribution to firearms design, manufacture, and production, because barely fifty years later, the product of Whitney's first major technological success would trigger a war that shaped American society and culture thereafter, fought with battlefield weapons produced en masse, in quantities that contributed greatly to the tragic numbers of casualties of the American Civil War (Nevins & Commager 1992).

Whitney is less widely appreciated in history for his other innovations, such as the many ways he reshaped business operations management and even the accounting methods (EWM 2008) that would later evolve into the modern business management principles ubiquitous in industrial manufacturing and throughout business economics today. According to some renowned American historical commentators (Mills 1953), the specific elements of business operations management introduced in this country by Whitney may have helped inspire the later contributions of even more influential progress in manufacturing largely credited to Henry Ford in the case of assembly-line production, and to personnel task management traditionally associated with Frederick Taylor (Hounshell 1984).

Early Life and Development:

Eli Whitney was born into a Massachusetts farming family in 1765 and lost his mother at the age of 12. While unremarkable in apparent academic talents, Whitney demonstrated superior technical skills and a natural talent for understanding mechanical principles from the time he was barely in his teens. He produced a violin from drawing board to complete assembly and could disassemble and reassemble time pieces before the age of 14 (EWM 2008).

The American Revolution had resulted in a complete embargo on goods produced in England, precipitating the scarcity of iron nails necessary for virtually every type of manufacturing and building processes. Whitney immediately saw the opportunity to capitalize on the opportunity and set about manufacturing nails for sale working directly out of a shed on his family's property. The cottage nail forging industry he had created to supply the great demand for nails was so successful that Whitney set out to find help, returning home after a three-day trip with a hired assistant.

It was in the context of manufacturing nails as a teenager that Whitney began implementing accounting principles such as factoring in every conceivable element of cost into the "overhead" of his business (Evans 2004). Later in his career, he would expand this concept to incorporate more sophisticated elements of business manufacturing including fixed costs such as the cost acquiring and maintaining equipment and that of necessary insurance (Gray 1987).

When England subsequently lifted the trade embargo with the emancipated American nation, the niche nail manufacturing market that Whitney had filled in the interim dried up. Anticipating this in advance, he took note of a change in the social fashion trends of the period, adapting his manufacturing processes and shifting his output to produce hatpins instead of nails. Whitney had perceived the increased demand for pins by American women necessitated by the shift from their habit of securing their bonnets to their heads by means of a scarf tied below the chin to the use of three pins applied to the bonnet (Evans 2004).

With the proceeds of his nail manufacturing industry combined with money that he earned teaching at local schools, Whitney enrolled at the Leicester Academy, and eventually matriculated at Yale University at the unusually old age of 23, supplementing his finances by fixing machinery and equipment owned and operated by the university, graduating in 1792 (Evans 2004). Instead of continuing the study of law, Whitney settled into a tutoring position in South Carolina, until a fellow Yale graduate, Phineas Miller, introduced him to Catherine Green, the widow of Revolutionary War hero General Nathaniel Green, for whom Miller worked, managing her Georgia estate. (EWM 2008).

It was General Green, together with his wife Catherine who spent the miserable winter of 1777-1778 with Washington's troops dug in at Valley Forge who was credited with maintaining their fighting capabilities and spirits, going so far as to finance their supplies and winter provisions by pledging away much of his personal property. In return, the Greens eventually received a Georgia plantation property named Mulberry Grove, as partial repayment of General Green's wartime expenses.

In fact, much of the debt incurred by the Green family far exceeded its value and most of it was never actually reimbursed to them by the government after the war.

General Green died penniless at the age of 44, after which Catherine battled Congress for six years, eventually receiving a grant of $47,000. By that time, she and Miller had married secretly, worried that their marriage could potentially undermine the award of compensation due Catherine by virtue of her former husband's wartime heroism, not to mention her own (Evans 2004).

The Cotton Gin:

Like other southern plantations, the Green plantation in Georgia produced cotton using a painstaking method of hand separating the cotton fibers from the cotton seeds.

Crude mechanical devices had been implemented in the separation process in coastal regions, but the consistency and greater stickiness of the inland cotton crops clogged the machines making them useless throughout much of the American South. Unlike the black-seed strain of cotton plants that grew in abundance in the coastal regions, the green-seed strain relied upon by inland plantations was exceptionally difficult to separate its short fibers from seeds, by comparison, but the more productive, long-fiber coastal black-seed variety would simply not grow elsewhere despite the greatest efforts to cultivate it (Nevins & Commager 1992).

In the American South, slave trade had begun to be seen as an economic opportunity, but the difficulties and economic realities presented by green-seed cotton plant threatened the future economic viability of the entire inland industry, even with the benefit of slave labor (Lakwete 2004). On the other hand, cotton was the principle component in the growing textile industry, and therefore, represented tremendous potential revenue for Southern cotton-producing states if this particular difficulty could ever be overcome. Well aware of Whitney's inventive talents and previous accomplishments, Catherine Green suggested that he consider devising a solution to the problem, which Whitney did, taking only 9 or 10 days to develop the first machine capable of separating green-seed cotton fibers from seeds more efficiently. Essentially, the famous cotton gin was a fairly simple device (pictured below) consisting of a hand-cranked rotor system that fed raw cotton into another roller lined with teeth appropriately-sized for separating cotton fiber and cotton seed (Evan 2004). Whitney is reputed to have remarked, during his lifetime, that one of the inspirations for the concept of the successful cotton gin occurred to him after watching a cat reach out for a chicken through a fence, only to withdraw a claw full of chicken feathers (EWM 2008). (EWM 2008)

The impact of the cotton gin on the cotton producing industry was immediate, understandable since it enabled one person to separate as much cotton as fifty individuals doing so by hand. Instead of taking a skilled laborer an entire day to produce a single pound of cotton fibers, even comparatively unskilled workers could produce fifty pounds of cotton fibers daily using one of Whitney's improved gins. However, on the advice of Green, Whitney envisioned a service-based industry akin to the sawmill industry (Lakwete 2004), wherein cotton farmers would pay as much as one-third to two-fifths of their cotton profits for the processing of their crops into marketable cotton fibers.

Initially, Whitney did market his new invention for direct sale, but demand far outpaced his ability to supply them in sufficient quantities, leading to the introduction of numerous counterfeited versions of his invention throughout the American South and even reaching to the northern states very shortly (Evans 2004).

In this respect, the innovative simplicity of Whitney's cotton gin was its greatest liability, at least in terms of providing revenue commensurate with its true value for its inventor. Whitney and Green had wrongly anticipated the willingness of cotton plantation owners to part with their profits. Unlike the situation establishing such a service market for the sawmill industry -- which was a service provided trough equipments and infrastructure not easily reproduced by loggers -- the cotton farmers realized almost immediately that Whitney's cotton gin could simply be reproduced independently instead. This completely eliminated the need to purchase equipment directly from its inventor, much less actually to part with a very substantial portion of their crop revenues for the offsite service planned by Whitney (Hounshell 1984).

Whitney had secured a patent for his device in 1794, but southern plantation owners essentially ignored it, just as they often regarded "Northern" laws as inapplicable to them, partly on the principle of their reluctance to allow laws and restrictions promulgated in the North to dictate southern life; as a practical matter, they also counted on the difficulty encountered by citizens of northern states attempting to enforce laws in southern courts. As a result, Whitney spent many years and significant sums in dozens of lawsuits over infringement of his patented device, without ever realizing any significant recovery of lost profits (Lakwete 2004).

The Larger Impact of a Simple Technological Invention:

Whitney's cotton gin resulted in an economic boon unparalleled previously in the southern states at a time when cotton could otherwise have been phased out as a profitable crop except in coastal areas. Instead, plantations expanded in size and many shifted their efforts almost exclusively to cotton. The impact was so significant that it shaped many elements of international trade in cotton fiber, establishing America as a producer of textile products and virtually eliminating any need to import fabric from abroad (Nevins & Commager 1992).

Even more importantly, the increased cotton production created an intense need for fieldworkers, precisely at a time when many historians (Mills 1953) believe that the institution of slavery might have fizzled out naturally, but for reasons of economic practicalities rather than moral philosophy about human rights. Instead, the slave trade exploded, becoming essential to the economic boon in southern states, eventually contributing very heavily to the antagonism between the North and South that led to the American Civil War half a century later. By that time, the effects of the industrial revolution had begun the shift, especially in the northern industrial states, of women working outside to the paradigm that persisted into modern times, whereby women primarily remained at home while men entered the labor force to provide for their families. The cotton gin fundamentally changed the economic relationship between this country and Europe, establishing America as a crucial global supplier of textile fabric. Tragically, the cotton gin also accounted for the explosion of the morally reprehensible international slave trade from Africa and the West Indies that ultimately lay at the root of the interstate conflicts that were only resolved by a lengthy and extremely costly civil war.

Weapons Manufacturing and Other Important Contributions of Eli Whitney:

In between the failure of Whitney's cotton gin to provide a financial profit for its inventor and the Civil War, Whitney seized another opportunity to earn a living from his inventiveness and mechanical skills. Specifically, as the nation prepared for the anticipated war with France, the government commissioned at least one dozen different arms manufacturers to increase the production of muskets and other firearms necessary for battle operations (Nevins & Commager 1992).

Gunsmiths of that era labored intensively over each weapon, crafting them by hand. More importantly, the manufacturing technology of the time was incapable of producing the individual component pieces of firearms that enabled them to be interchanged with other units. Whitney is credited with introducing manufacturing procedures capable of producing weapons whose component parts met much higher mechanical deviation tolerances conducive to the interchangeability of their many working parts (Evans 2004).

In truth, while Whitney certainly inspired the incorporation of component part interchangeability in manufacturing (in weapons as well as in general), his ideas were preceded by at least two Frenchmen (Hounshell 1984), who had already begun manufacturing firearms with interchangeable component parts. Nevertheless, Whitney is remembered for the dramatic way that he demonstrated the concept to the War Department. Ironically, later historians subsequently deduced that Whitney's dramatic demonstration of component part interchangeability was actually a sham that he perpetrated using surreptitious markings on rifle parts that enabled him to identify matched components while pretending to select them completely at random (Evans 2004).