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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 sel
-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
Word Count: 834
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