Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 - January 8, 1825) was an American inventor known for discovering cotton gin. This was one of the key discoveries of the Industrial Revolution and formed the South of Antebellum. Whitney's invention made the plane's short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundations of slavery in the United States. Despite the social and economic impact of his inventions, Whitney lost much advantage in the legal battle for patent infringement for gin cotton. After that, he turned his attention to getting a contract with the government in the making of a rifle for the newly formed US Army. He continued to make weapons and created until his death in 1825.
Video Eli Whitney
Early life and education
Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest son of Eli Whitney Sr., a prosperous farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Fay, also from Westborough.
Although the younger Eli, born in 1765, technically can be called "Junior", history never knew him that way. He was famous for his lifetime and then under the name "Eli Whitney". His son, born in 1820, was also named Eli, famous for his lifetime and later under the name "Eli Whitney, Jr."
Whitney's mother, Elizabeth Fay, died in 1777, when she was 11 years old. At the age of 14 he operated a profitable nail operation at his father's workshop during the Revolutionary War.
Because her stepmother opposed her wish to go to college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and a schoolteacher to save money. He prepares for Yale at Leicester Academy (now Becker College) and under the care of Rev. Elizur Goodrich from Durham, Connecticut, he entered in the fall of 1789 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792. Whitney was expected to study law but, finding himself underfunded, accepted an offer to go to South Carolina as a private tutor.
Instead of achieving his goal, he is sure to visit Georgia. In the closing years of the 18th century, Georgia was a magnet for New Englanders looking for their luck (the revolutionary governor was Lyman Hall, a migrant from Connecticut). When he initially sailed to South Carolina, among his shipmates was the widow and family of the hero of Revolution General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. Mrs. Greene invited Whitney to visit his plantation in Georgia, Mulberry Grove. Her planter and prospective husband is Phineas Miller, another Connecticut migrant and Yale graduate (class 1785), who will be Whitney's business partner.
Whitney is best known for two innovations that had a significant influence on the United States in the mid-19th century: cotton gin (1793) and his defense of interchangeable parts. In the South, cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was harvested and revived slavery. In the North, the adoption of interchangeable parts revolutionized the manufacturing industry, and contributed greatly to the US victory in the Civil War.
Maps Eli Whitney
Careers
Cotton gin
Cotton sugar is a mechanical device that removes seeds from cotton, a process that was previously very labor-intensive. The word gin is short for the machine. The cotton separator is a wood drum stuck with a hook that pulls cotton fibers through a net. Cotton seeds will not fit through the net and fall outside. Whitney occasionally told a story where she was thinking of a better method of seeding cotton when she was inspired by watching a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence, and could only draw some of the feathers.
One gin cotton can produce up to 55 pounds (25 kg) of clean cotton every day. It contributes to the economic development of the Southern States of the United States, a major area of ​​growing cotton; some historians believe that this discovery enabled the African system of slavery in the Southern United States to be more sustainable at a critical point in its development.
Whitney received a patent (later given the X72 number) for a cotton gin on March 14, 1794, but was not validated until 1807. Whitney and his partner, Miller, did not intend to sell gin. Conversely, like the owners of wheat and sawmills, they hope to charge farmers to clean their cotton - two-fifths of the value, paid with cotton. The hatred of this scheme, the mechanical simplicity of the device and the primitive state of patent law, make it unavoidable. Whitney and Miller can not build enough gins to meet demand, so gins from other makers find ready sales. In the end, the patent infringement lawsuit consumed a profit and their cotton gin company went out of business in 1797. One that is often overlooked is that there is a weakness in Whitney's first design. There is significant evidence that design flaws were solved by plantation owner, Catharine Littlefield Greene, wife of American Revolution General Nathanael Greene; Whitney did not give her credit or public recognition.
While cotton gin did not produce the lucky Whitney she hoped for, it gave her fame.
It has been suggested by some historians that Whitney's gin cotton is an important cause of the unintentional American Civil War. After Whitney's invention, the industrial plantation slavery was rejuvenated, eventually culminating in the Civil War.
And the gin of cotton transforms South agriculture and national economy. Southern Cotton finds a ready market in Europe and in a burgeoning textile factory in New England. US cotton exports soared after the appearance of cotton - from less than 500,000 pounds (230,000 kg) in 1793 to 93 million pounds (42,000,000 kg) in 1810. Cotton is a staple that can be stored for long periods and sent long distances, unlike most agricultural products. This is a major U.S. export, which represents more than half the value of US exports from 1820 to 1860.
Paradoxically, gin cotton, a tool that saves manpower, helps maintain slavery in the US. Prior to the 1790s, forced labor was primarily used in growing rice, tobacco, and indigo, none of which were more profitable. Not cotton, because it is difficult to remove seeds. But with gin, cotton planting with forced labor becomes very profitable - a major source of wealth in South America, and the base of border settlements from Georgia to Texas. "King Cotton" became the dominant economic power, and slavery was maintained as a key institution of Southern society.
Interchangeable parts
Eli Whitney was often wrongly credited with creating ideas about interchangeable parts, which he had fought for years as a rifle maker; However, the idea preceded Whitney, and Whitney's role in it was one of promotion and popularization, not invention. The successful application of the idea avoided Whitney until near the end of his life, occurring first in the arsenal of others.
Efforts to transform parts can be traced back as far as the Punis War through the archaeological remains of these ships now at the Museo Archeologico Baglio Anselmi and contemporary writings. In modern times this idea developed for decades among many people. An early leader was Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, an 18th-century French artillery who created a fair amount of artillery standardization, though not really interchangeable parts of it. He inspired others, including HonorÃÆ'Â © Blanc and Louis de Tousard, to work further on the idea, and on shoulder and artillery weapons. In the 19th century these efforts resulted in "weapon systems", or American manufacturing systems. Several other New Englanders, including Captain John H. Hall and Simeon North, arrived at a successful crossroads before Whitney's weapon equipment. Whitney's armament finally succeeded shortly after his death in 1825.
The motive behind Whitney's acceptance of the contract to produce a rifle in 1798 was largely monetary. By the late 1790s, Whitney was on the brink of bankruptcy and the cotton court process had made her deeply indebted. His New Haven cotton gin factory had burned down, and litigation weakened the remaining resources. The French Revolution has sparked a new conflict between Britain, France and the United States. The new American government, realizing the need to prepare for war, began to rearm. The War Department issued a contract for the manufacture of 10,000 rifles. Whitney, who never made a weapon in his life, obtained a contract in January 1798 to deliver 10,000 to 15,000 rifles in 1800. He did not mention any parts that could be exchanged at that time. Ten months later, Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott, Jr., sent him "an alien pamphlet on weapons manufacturing techniques," perhaps one of Honorà ©  © Blanc's reports, after which Whitney first began to talk about the exchange.
In May 1798, Congress voted for a law that would use eight hundred thousand dollars to pay for small arms and cannons if a war with France erupted. It offers a 5,000 dollar incentive with an additional 5,000 dollars after the money is spent for people capable of accurately generating weapons for the government. Since the cotton gin did not give Whitney the reward he believed to be promised, he accepted the offer. Although the contract was for one year, Whitney did not deliver weapons until 1809, using various reasons for the delay. Recently, historians have discovered that during 1801-1806, Whitney took the money and headed to South Carolina to benefit from the cotton mill.
Although Whitney's demonstration in 1801 seemed to indicate the feasibility of making interchangeable parts, Merritt Roe Smith concluded that it was "staged" and "tricked the government" into believing that it had succeeded. The invitation gives him time and resources to achieve that goal.
When the government complains that Whitney's price per rifle is less good than that produced in the government arsenal, he is able to calculate the actual price per rifle by including fixed costs such as insurance and machinery, which the government has yet to take into account. Thus he made an initial contribution to both cost accounting concepts, and economic efficiency in manufacturing.
Milling machine
Machine tool historian Joseph W. Roe complimented Whitney by creating the first milling machine around 1818. Subsequent work by other historians (Woodbury; Smith; Muir; Battison [cited by Baida]) suggests that Whitney was one of the contemporaries who all developed the machine milling at about the same time (1814 to 1818), and others more important to innovation than Whitney. (The ardent engine of Roe might not have been built until 1825, after Whitney's death.) Therefore, no one can be described as the inventor of a grinding machine.
Later life and heritage
Despite his humble origins, Whitney is well aware of the value of social and political connections. In building his arm business, he made full use of his access as Yale alumnus gave him to other well-placed graduates, such as Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Finance Secretary (class 1778), and James Hillhouse, developer and political leader of New Haven.
Her 1817 marriage to Henrietta Edwards, the granddaughter of renowned evangelist Jonathan Edwards, daughter of Pierpont Edwards, head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, and Yale's first cousin, Timothy Dwight, the state's Federalist leader, tied her up with the Connecticut ruling elite.. In businesses that rely on government contracts, such connections are essential to success.
Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8, 1825, in New Haven, Connecticut, just a month after her 59th birthday. He left a widow and four children behind. During his illness, he discovered and built several devices to ease his pain mechanically. These tools, whose images are in the papers they collect, are effective but never made for use by others because of the reluctance of their heirs to trade in "unprotected" items.
Student Program Eli Whitney, Yale University's admissions program for non-traditional students, is named in honor of Whitney, who just started her studies there when she was 23 years old, but went on to Phi Beta Kappa graduate in just three years.
See also
- The Whitney family
- Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science
- Eli Whitney Museum
References
Further reading
External links
- The Eli Whitney Museum
- Biography of Eli Whitney at the Whitney Research Group
- Inventor of the Week: Eli Whitney (MIT)
- Sign in New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Photo of the house where Cotton Gin found, Wilkes County, Georgia, ca. 1910
- Text on Wikisource:
- "Whitney, Eli". The New Encyclopedia of Collier . 1921.
- "Whitney, Eli". Encyclopedia Americana . 1920.
- "Whitney, Eli". EncyclopÃÆ'Â|dia Britannica (issue 11). 1911.
- "Whitney, Eli". New International Encyclopedia . 1905.
- "Whitney, Eli". Appletons' CyclopÃÆ'Â|dia of American Biography . 1889.
- "Whitney, Eli". The CyclopÃÆ'Â|dia America . 1879.
- Letter from Eli Whitney to his Father about his discovery of a cotton gin, September 11, 1793
- Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Eli Whitney, Jr. about his cotton patent, November 16, 1793
- Obituary for Eli Whitney, in Niles Weekly Register, January 25, 1825
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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