GREAT AMERICANS—ELI WHITNEY

Eli Whitney has been deemed the "father of American technology," for his many innovations and inventions, including the cotton gin. His idea of machine-made, interchangeable parts was to become the beginning of what would be known as the "American system" of mass production. He was born in 1765 and grew up on a Massachusetts farm. It was during the Revolutionary War that he manufactured nails to fill the demand caused by British embargos. Young Eli quickly learned how the marketplace worked, and diversified into hatpins and canes. It was his genius to observe what people needed, and to make it for them.

He attended Yale, and soon after graduating moved to South Carolina. He quickly saw how hard it was to separate the green seeds from short-staple cotton. Amazingly in just a few days, in 1793, he designed a machine that could do the task more than ten times faster than a slave would doing the work by hand. This cotton gin revolutionized American agriculture. It also made possible the cotton economy of the American South, unfortunately perpetuating and increasing the practice of slavery upon which the agricultural system depended. In 1798, after not seeing much profit from his cotton machine, Whitney launched a new venture of arms manufacturing. Once again he watched his market carefully, noting a war scare in France, and delivered something necessary and innovative--arms that he claimed could be produced more efficiently with the help of machines. This is where Whitney was finally able to make money from his genius 

Whitney was a shrewd employer, and he advanced the paternalistic company town-factory system that would characterize the American industrial revolution by linking economic progress with the Puritanical attributes of diligence, sobriety, and thrift. Many others would copy this concept that was to control whole families with everything they needed, from housing to foods to banking . Whitney died in 1825 but left a great legacy of American genius that was the model for the world for the next 150+ years.