Whitney, Eli
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Eli (1765-1825), an American inventor. He was born at New Haven . He earned his own way through Yale, partly by teaching and partly by working at the trade of carpentering. After graduation in 1792 he went to Georgia to teach. Here he became an inmate of the family of the widow of General Nathaniel Greene of Revolutionary fame. While residing on her estate and reading law he became interested in the problem of extracting the seed from the ripened cotton. The utmost that a slave could do in a day was to pick the fiber free from five or six pounds of cotton. Whitney invented a rotating saw gin by which a single hand, with the assistance of a horse to pull the sweep, could twitch the fiber of 300 pounds through a wire screen and leave the seeds behind. He obtained a patent in 1794, but, through carelessness in exposing his model, other parties already had machines in use or on the market. The state of Carolina voted him $50,000 in recognition of his services. This sum and all he made out of the gin he spent vainly in lawsuits to protect his rights from infringement. All told, he gained fame but no money from the cotton gin. In 1798 he was awarded a government contract for the manufacture of firearms. He settled down at Whitneyville, Connecticut, and made a fortune in this business. He invented no end of ingenious labor-saving machinery. He is said to have been the first manufacturer to adopt the plan of division of labor. He kept each mechanic at work making a single part of the guns. See Cotton
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Two of Aiton's 1910 statements no longer stand. Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, not New Haven; and the claim that he "was the first manufacturer to adopt the plan of division of labor" was dismantled by Robert S. Woodbury's 1960 study "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts," which showed that his musket components were hand-fitted and not truly interchangeable, and that the technique was pioneered earlier by Honore Blanc in France and developed further at the Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories. Historians now also foreground what the 1910 entry mentions only as a unit of labor: by making short-staple cotton profitable across the uplands, the gin helped drive the enslaved population of the American South from under 700,000 in 1790 to some four million by 1860. Some scholars additionally credit Catherine Greene, and the roller-gin knowledge of enslaved Africans, with shaping the machine Whitney patented in 1794.
Written for this edition, 2026.