Eli Whitney

Historians believe that one of the greatest pioneers in the birth
of automation, American inventor, pioneer, mechanical engineer,
and manufacturer Eli Whitney. Best remembered as the inventor of
the cotton gin. He made his first violin when he was only 12. Eli
started college when he was 23, in 1788. He left for Georgia and
got his first look at cotton business. He graduated from Yale in
1792, and went to Savannah, Georgia to teach and study law. After
he graduated he went south to tutor the children of a wealthy
plantation owner. He taught school for five years. Eli Whitney
made and sold nails during the Revolutionary war. In 1798 Eli
obtained a government contract to make 10,000 muskets. In 1812 he
was given another contract for 15,000 muskets .He built the first
firearms factory to use mass production methods. When Eli Whitney
built his first factory in 1798, he allocated a great deal of his
precious resources to providing housing for his workers as well
as ensuring that they were well off financially. This
consideration marked his entire career as an industrialist. He
wanted to “employ steady sober people,”tied to his factory and
part of a community of industry. He intended to create a self-
sufficient village, producing goods, and populated by well
educated, happy workers,Whitneyville. He also affected the
industrial development of the United States , in manufacturing
muskets but most of whitney’s own guns parts do not in fact
interchange. Nevertheless, Eli Whitney is a figure whose history
is fascinating, and whose impact in New Haven can not be
overstated. He translated the concept of interchangeable parts
into a manufacturing system, giving birth to the Americanmass-
production concept. Whitney saw that a machine to clean the seed
from cotton could make the South prosperous and make its inventor
rich. He set to work at once and within days had drawn a sketch
to explain his idea; 10 days later he constructed a crude model
that separated fiber from seed. By 1793 he designed and
constructed a machine called the cotton gin, that quickly
separated cotton seed from the shortstaple cotton fiber. The
first cotton gin was a wooden box that spun around a drum and
picked the cotton seed with wire hooks.Cotton Gin, machine used
to separate the fibers of cotton from the seeds. Before the
invention of the cotton gin, seeds had to be removed from cotton
fibers by hand; this labor-intensive and time-consuming process
made growing and harvesting cotton uneconomical. The cotton gin
allowed the seeds to be removed mechanically and rapidly from the
cotton fibers, making cotton production economical and leading to
dramatic growth in the United States cotton industry. This
expansion contributed to an increase of slave labor in the United
States. Whitney’s cotton gin, also called a saw gin, consisted of
a cylinder to which a number of sawlike teeth were attached. As
the cylinder revolved, the teeth passed through the closely
spaced ribs of a fixed comb. When cotton was fed into the gin,
the teeth caught the cotton fibers and pulled them through the
comb. The seeds, which were too large to pass between the ribs,
were left behind,( This principle, with virtually no
modifications, is still employed in modern automatic saw gins
used to process the bulk of the U.S. cotton crop).After
perfecting his machine he filed an application for a patent on
June 20, 1793; in February 1794 he deposited a model at the
Patent Office, and on March 14 he received his patent. Whitney’s
gin brought the South prosperity.Whitney entered into partnership
with the plantation manager, Phineas Miller, to manufacture
cotton gins at New Haven, Connecticut. A disastrous factory fire
prevented the partners from making enough gins to meet the
demand, and manufacturers throughout the South began to copy the
invention.but the unwillingness of the planters to pay for its
use and the ease with which the gin could be pirated put
Whitney’s company out of business by 1797. When Congress refused
to renew the patent, which expired in 1807, Whitney concluded
that ‘an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the
inventor.’ He never patented his later inventions, one of which
was a milling machine the other ground gravel used in road
production. His genius as expressed in tools, machines, and
technological ideas made the southern United States dominant in
cotton production and the northern states a bastion of industry.
He had one sister- Elizabeth, and two brothers- Benjamin and
Josiah. In 1817 he married Henrietta Frances Edwards of
Bridgeport, Connecticut. They had three daughters and one son.
Eli Whitney died in 1824 of natural causes. There is a award this
day which is for distinguished accomplishments in improving
capability within the broad concept of orderly production. The
person receiving this Award should be presently in a top
management position, active personally in the development of
ideas, concept of process, associated with engineering,
responsible for proven concepts, with wide recognition in the
area of mass production and generating greater productivity