Early Life and Education

Eli Whitney was born on December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts. His father, Eli Whitney Sr., was a respected farmer who also served as a justice of the peace. His mother, Elizabeth Fay, died in 1777. The young Whitney was considered a born mechanic. He could take apart and reassemble his father’s watch, and he designed and built a violin. By age 14, during the Revolutionary War, Biographry of Eli Whitney and Founder of Cotton Gin Biographry of Eli Whitney and Founder of Cotton Gin Biographry of Eli Whitney and Founder of Cotton Gin Whitney was running a profitable nail forge out of his father’s workshop.

Before entering college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and school teacher while studying at Leicester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. He entered Yale College in the fall of 1789 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792, having learned many of the latest concepts in science and industrial technology.

Path to the Cotton Gin

After graduating from Yale, Whitney hoped to practice law and teach, but he wasn’t able to land a job. He left Massachusetts to take a position as a private tutor at Mulberry Grove, a Georgia plantation owned by Catherine Littlefield Greene. Whitney soon became a close friend of Greene and her plantation manager, Phineas Miller. A fellow Yale graduate, Miller would eventually become Whitney’s business partner.

At Mulberry Grove, Whitney learned that inland Southern growers desperately needed a way to make cotton a profitable crop. Long-staple cotton was easy to separate from its seeds, but could only be grown along the Atlantic coast. Short staple cotton, the one variety that grew inland, had many small and sticky green seeds that took time and labor to pick out of the cotton bolls. Profits from tobacco were shrinking because of over-supply and soil exhaustion, so the success of cotton growing was vital to the economic survival of the South.

Whitney realized that machines capable of efficiently removing the seeds from short-staple cotton could make the South prosperous and its inventor wealthy. With the moral and financial support of Catherine Greene, Whitney went to work on his best-known invention: the cotton gin.

The Cotton Gin

In a matter of weeks, Whitney built a working model of the cotton gin. A cotton gin is a machine that removes the seeds from raw cotton fiber, a previously labor-intensive process. In one day, a single Whitney cotton gin could produce nearly 60 pounds of clean, ready to weave cotton. By contrast, hand-cleaning could produce only a few pounds of cotton in a day.

Similar in concept to today’s massive cotton processing plants, Whitney’s cotton gin employed a rotating wooden drum studded with hooks that grabbed the raw cotton fibers and pulled them through a mesh screen. Too large to fit through the mesh, the cotton seeds fell outside the gin. Whitney liked to say that he had been inspired by watching a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence and seeing that only the feathers through came through.

On March 14, 1794, the U.S. government granted Whitney a patent—Patent No. 72-X—for his cotton gin. Rather than selling the gins, Whitney and his business partner Phineas Miller planned to profit by charging growers to clean their cotton with them. However, the mechanical simplicity of the cotton gin, the primitive state of U.S. patent law at the time, and the growers’ objections to Whitney’s scheme made attempts to infringe on his patent inevitable.

Unable to build enough gins to meet the demand for their cotton cleaning services, Whitney and Miller watched as other makers churned out similar gins ready for sale. Eventually, the legal costs of protecting their patent rights consumed their profits and drove their cotton gin company out of business in 1797. When the government refused to renew his cotton gin patent, Whitney remarked that “an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.” Embittered by the experience, he would never attempt to patent any of his later inventions.

Though he never profited from it, Whitney’s cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and bolstered the U.S. economy. Growing textile mills in New England and Europe became eager buyers of Southern cotton. After the introduction of the gin, U.S. cotton exports grew from less than 500,000 pounds in 1793 to 93 million pounds by 1810. Cotton soon became America’s main export, representing over half the value of total U.S. exports from 1820 to 1860.

The cotton gin significantly bolstered the African slave trade. In fact, the gin made growing cotton so profitable that growers enslaved more people. According to many historians, the invention of the gin made growing cotton with the stolen labor of enslaved people a highly profitable undertaking that became the primary source of wealth in the American South and helped drive westward expansion from Georgia to Texas. Paradoxically, while the gin made “King Cotton” a dominant American economic force, it also sustained enslavement as an economic and social institution in the Southern states, a key cause of the American Civil War. 

Interchangeable Parts 

By the late 1790s, legal fees from patent fights and a fire that destroyed his cotton gin factory had left Whitney on the verge of bankruptcy. However, inventing the cotton gin had earned him a reputation for ingenuity and mechanical expertise which he would soon apply to a major government project.

In 1797, the U.S. government was preparing for a possible war with France, but the government armories had managed to produce only 1,000 muskets in three years. The reason for this slow pace was the conventional method of arms production, in which every part of every musket was handmade by a single gunsmith. Since each weapon was unique, replacement parts had to be specially made—a time-consuming and costly process. To speed up production, the War Department solicited bids from private contractors for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets.

Eli Whitney had never built a gun in his life, but he won the government contract by proposing to deliver all 10,000 muskets in just two years. To accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, he proposed inventing new machine tools that would enable unskilled workers to make identical individual parts of each particular musket model. Since any part would fit any musket, repairs could be made quickly in the field.

To build the muskets, Whitney built an entire town called Whitneyville, located in the present-day Hamden, Connecticut. At the center of Whitneyville was the Whitney Armory. Employees lived and worked in Whitneyville; to attract and keep the best workers, Whitney provided free housing and education and vocational training for the workers’ children.

By January 1801, Whitney had failed to deliver a single gun. He was summoned to Washington to justify his continued use of government funds. In a storied display, Whitney reportedly amazed outgoing President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson by assembling several working muskets from a random selection of parts. It was later proven that Whitney had actually marked the correct musket parts beforehand. However, the demonstration won Whitney continued funding and credit for what Jefferson declared “the dawn of the machine age.”

Ultimately, it took Whitney ten years to deliver the 10,000 muskets he had contracted to deliver in two. When the government questioned Whitney’s price per musket compared to the weapons made in the government armories, he provided a complete cost breakdown, including fixed costs such as machinery and insurance, which were not included in the production costs of the government-made guns. He is credited for one of the first demonstrations of total cost accounting and economic efficiency in manufacturing.

Today, Whitney’s role as the originator of the idea of interchangeable parts has been largely disproven. As early as 1785, French gunsmith Honoré Blanc suggested making easily replaceable gun parts from standard templates. In fact, Thomas Jefferson, then serving as American minister to France, visited Blanc’s workshop in 1789 and was reportedly impressed by his methods. However, Blanc’s idea was flatly rejected by the French gun market, as individual competing gunsmiths realized the devastating effect it would have on their business. Even earlier, English naval engineer Samuel Bentham originated the use of standardized parts in wooden pulleys for raising and lowering sails.

While the idea was not his own, Whitney’s work nevertheless did much to popularize the v of interchangeable parts in the United States.

Later Life

Until middle age, Whitney put much of his personal life, including marriage and family, on hold. His work had been his life. In a series of letters to his old patron, Catherine Greene, Whitney revealed his feelings of isolation and loneliness. After Greene married Whitney’s former cotton gin business partner Phineas Miller, Whitney began to refer to himself as the “solitary Old Bachelor.”

In 1817, at age 52, Whitney moved to recapture his personal life when he married 31-year-old Henrietta Edwards. Henrietta was a granddaughter of famed evangelist Jonathan Edwards and daughter of Pierpont Edwards, then the head of the Connecticut Democratic Party. The couple had three daughters and one son: Elizabeth Fay, Frances, Susan, and Eli. Known throughout his life as “Eli Whitney, Jr.,” Whitney’s son took over his father’s arms manufacturing business and taught physics and mechanical arts at the University of Vermont, Cornell University, Columbia College, and Brown University.

Death

Eli Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8, 1825, just a month after his 59th birthday. Though plagued by the pain of his illness, Whitney studied human anatomy with his doctors and invented a new type of catheter and other devices to help ease his pain. In his final days, Whitney sketched designs for improved tools for making lock parts.

The nation’s high regard for Whitney was expressed in his obituary published in the Niles Weekly Register on January 25, 1825:

His [Whitney’s] inventive genius rendered him one of the greatest benefactors of the age, and was the means of changing the whole course of industry in the southern section of the union.

Mr. Whitney was a gentleman of extensive literary and scientific attainments, of liberal and expanded views, benevolent in his feelings, and mild and unassuming in his manners. While his death will be regarded by the nation as a public calamity, it will be felt in the circle of his private friends as a bereavement of its brightest ornament.

Whitney was buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. The foundation of the building where his first operating cotton gin was erected still stands on the grounds of the old Mulberry Grove plantation in Port Wentworth, Georgia. However, the most visible monument to Whitney’s memory is located in Hamden, Connecticut, where the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop has preserved the remains of his groundbreaking musket factory village on the Mill River.

Legacy

Never active or even interested in politics or public affairs, Whitney did not live to see his inventions’ sweeping impact on the development of America. His cotton gin revolutionized agriculture in the South, but made the region even more dependent on stolen labor of enslaved people. At the same time, his advances in more efficient manufacturing methods helped the North grow its wealth and status as an industrial power. In 1861, these two divergent economic, political, and social systems collided in what remains the nation’s bloodiest war: the American Civil War.

Today, the Eli Whitney Students Program at Yale University, named in Whitney’s honor, offers a preferred admissions program for individuals whose educational careers have been interrupted.