Nearly every elementary school student knows that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin--a tool that cleaned seeds off of cotton plants almost instantly. It changed the world and made the early United States of America a global economic powerhouse. But how many people know that what Whitney did next was even more revolutionary?
This is the forgotten history of Eli Whitney's other invention.
Whitney was a highly intelligent Yale graduate who in 1792 landed a tutoring job in South Carolina, far from his home and everything he knew. He didn't want to travel south, but needed the money to pay of his education debts, so he reluctantly packed up his life and moved.
When he arrived, though, he found that the job didn't pay nearly as much as he had been told it would, so he turned it down. Fortunately, he had ridden south with a wealthy widow who offered him a job on her cotton plantation in Georgia. With no other options and no money to return home, Whitney accepted.
Once he arrived, he couldn't believe how inefficiently the cotton was picked and prepared for sale. He developed a wooden roller with wire teeth that he called the cotton gin. Almost immediately, this simple invention revolutionized cotton production and made the American south the world's leader in textile exports.
But Whitney's problem was that his cotton gin was too simple. He thought that he would make a fortune off of it, but instead of using his ginning service, farmers across the south simply built their own copycat devices.
Whitney sued, but copyright law was still in its infancy, and proving his claims were exceedingly difficult. Six years after he invented the gin, his lawsuits were still tied up in court. He was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
But inspiration struck again. The United States was teetering on the brink of war with France, and it needed muskets. Tens of thousands of them. And it needed them quickly.
A fundamental problem, though, was that muskets were each manufactured by hand--a process that took far too long for a nation that needed to arm itself for war.
Whitney recognized this and implemented a system he had used to make his cotton gins more rapidly. Instead of relying on one craftsman to make an entire rifle, he would break the manufacturing down into its various parts and employ average-skilled workers instead of master rifle-makers to each take part.
One worker would make the trigger, another the handle. Another worker would make the barrel and another would put the pieces together. The pieces would be interchangeable so that they could fit on every rifle that the team made.
Whitney signed a contract with the government for thousands of rifles, but they were never needed. War with France was averted.
Still, Whitney had revolutionized the American economy again--in a way that was far more powerful and wide-ranging than his cotton gin. Every product, not just rifles, could be made quicker, cheaper, and more efficiently. Whitney called it "The American System."
Today, we know Eli Whitney's other invention by another name: Mass production.