Eli Whitney and Firearms

Eli Whitney - firearms and the birth of standardization


We left Eli Whitney defeated in his efforts to divert to himself some adequate share of the untold riches arising from his great invention of the cotton gin. Eli Whitney, however, had other sources of profit in his own character and mechanical ability. As early as 1798 he had turned his talents to the manufacture of firearms. He had established his shops at Whitneyville, near New Haven; and it was there that he worked out another achievement quite as important economically as the cotton gin, even though the immediate consequences were less spectacular: namely, the principle of standardization or interchangeability in manufacture.

Standardization

This principle is the very foundation today of all American large-scale production. The manufacturer produces separately thousands of copies of every part of a complicated machine, confident that an equal number of the complete machine will be assembled and set in motion. The owner of a motor car, a reaper, a tractor, or a sewing machine, orders, perhaps by telegraph or telephone, a broken or lost part, taking it for granted that the new part can be fitted easily and precisely into the place of the old.

Though it is probable that this idea of standardization, or interchangeability, originated independently in Whitney's mind, and though it is certain that he and one of his neighbors, who will be mentioned presently, were the first manufacturers in the world to carry it out successfully in practice, yet it must be noted that the idea was not entirely new. We are told that the system was already in operation in England in the manufacture of ship's blocks. From no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson we learn that a French mechanic had previously conceived the same idea. But, as no general result whatever came from the idea in either France or England, the honors go to Whitney and North, since they carried it to such complete success that it spread to other branches of manufacturing. And in the face of opposition. When Whitney wrote that his leading object was "to substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience," in order to make the same parts of different guns "as much like each other as the successive impressions of a copper-plate engraving," he was laughed to scorn by the ordnance officers of France and England. "Even the Washington officials," says Roe, "were sceptical and became uneasy at advancing so much money without a single gun having been completed, and Whitney went to Washington, taking with him ten pieces of each part of a musket. He exhibited these to the Secretary of War and the army officers interested, as a succession of piles of different parts. Selecting indiscriminately from each of the piles, he put together ten muskets, an achievement which was looked on with amazement."

Simeon North

While Eli Whitney worked out his plans at Whitneyville, Simeon North, another Connecticut mechanic and a gunmaker by trade, adopted the same system. Simeon North's first shop was at Berlin. He afterwards moved to Middletown. Like Eli Whitney, he used methods far in advance of the time. Both Eli Whitney and Simeon North helped to establish the United States Arsenals at Springfield, Massachusetts, and at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in which their methods were adopted. Both the Whitney and North plants survived their founders. Just before the Mexican War the Whitney plant began to use steel for gun barrels, and Jefferson Davis, Colonel of the Mississippi Rifles, declared that the new guns were "the best rifles which had ever been issued to any regiment in the world." Later, when Davis became Secretary of War, he issued to the regular army the same weapon.

Eli Whitney should be revered as the greatest 19th–century American figure in library technical services. Not Dewey, not Cutter – just that longsuffering Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney. Whitney's real claim to our recognition was not his celebrated cotton gin, an invention that changed the South but brought him virtually nothing because of patent infringements. Whitney's genius was that he perfected the "American factory system," which is synonymous with the assembly line and interchangeable parts.

In 1800, rifles were the pinnacle of American craftsmanship. Each rifle was a work of art by an individual gunsmith; every part was made by hand. It's hard to imagine, but every rifle in the American army 200 years ago was a unique example of craftsmanship. Sure, all rifles of a type might conform to specifications, but the notion that a part from one rifle could be taken off and put onto another rifle was as foreign a concept as letting women vote.

Whitney's bold idea was to make machines that would make rifle parts. This was the origin of the American machine–tool industry, and the beginning of the modern factory. Whitney designed a saw that cut the wooden gunstocks, and other machines that could be guided to cut metal parts of rifles, so that someone else could assemble the parts into a completed firearm. Eli Whitney envisioned meta–machines – machines that made other machines :right:

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 self-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

WHITNEY, ELI, inventor, was born Dec. 8, 1765, in Westborough, Mass. The first of his inventions was the cotton gin, which he was stimulated to devise by the widow of Nathaniel Green. He afterward reaped a fortune by his various improvements on fire-arms; the manufacturing of which became the origin of the flourishing village of Whitneyville, Conn. He died Jan. 8, 1825, in New Haven, Conn. [HE]

It was not until after Eli Whitney invented the "gin" (from engine) for removing seeds from cotton that cotton was used extensively. Prior to that time flax, which produced linen, was the item from which people made many of their household items and clothing articles.

WHITNEY, Eli, inventor, was born in West-borough, Mass., Dec. 8, 1765. He engaged in the business of making nails by hand, and by his industry saved money enough to pay his college expenses, being graduated from Yale, A.B., 1792, A.M., 1795. He was invited by the widow of Gen. Nathanael Greene to make his home at her plantation, called Mulberry Grove, on the Savannah river in Georgia. He studied law, but abandoned it to follow his mechanical talent, devoting himself to the problem of inventing a machine for separating cotton lint from the seed.

In 1793 he solved the difficulty by completing the saw cotton gin, which consists of two cylinders: one, revolving with great velocity, to pull the lint from the seed by means of from fifty to eighty steel disks with serrated edges, and the other to remove the lint from the saw teeth by means of stiff brushes. This machine, which, with a few improvements remains exactly as it was first invented, has a capacity equal to that of 3000 pairs of hands in separating the lint from the seed, which process, up to the time of its invention, was the only means used in the separation.

Mr. Whitney was unable to keep his invention secret, and before he could obtain a patent several gins were being operated on various neighboring plantations. He formed a partnership with Phineas Miller, and removed to Connecticut to manufacture the machines, but owing to endless litigation caused by the infringement of his patent, he was obliged in 1796 to devote himself to the manufacture of firearms in order to obtain a livelihood.

He removed to New Haven, Conn., and originated the system of making the manufacture of different parts of a gun interchangeable among several mechanics. He built an armory at Whitneyville, near New Haven, and filled a government contract for ten thousand stands of muskets.

He received $50,000 from the legislature of South Carolina for the general use of the cotton gin, and was allowed a further royalty on every gin used in the state, but considering the universal benefit derived from the invention, this was but small recompense.

He established a fund of $500 at Yale college, the interest to be devoted to the purchase of books or, mechanical and physical science. He was married in 1817, to a daughter of Judge Pierpont Edwards¤. His "Memoir" was published by Denison Olmsted in 1846. He died in New Haven, Conn., Jan. 8, 1825.

http://www.eliwhitney.org/arms.htm

A "stand of arms" included the musket and its bayonet and ramrod, both of which also had to fit securely and smoothly to the weapon and be durable in use. The conversion of metals into ramrods, bayonets, barrels, locks, and "mountings" took place, broadly speaking, in two stages: the first shaping required heat and the second required cutting tools. Except for the barrels, these two processes at the Whitney Armory took place in buildings on opposite sides of the Mill River. On the east bank were the forge fires for the shaping of parts; on the west bank were the machines and tools for the cutting of parts. It is probable that the welding, grinding, and boring of the barrels all took place on the west bank, although the evidence on this point so far is inconclusive, after which they were test-fired in a proofhouse on the east bank. In Eli Whitney Jr.'s day, the heat-treating operations of case-hardening and annealing also took place on the east bank and a foundry was added to the complex of buildings there, to allow shaping by casting as well as by forging. Conversion of hardwood into shaped and "inletted" gunstocks and of softwood into shipping crates took place on the west bank, as did the assembly of the parts and packing of completed weapons.

Over the ninety years of the Whitney Armory's existence, much technological change took place both in metal and wood-working machinery and in metallurgical capabilities. Changes also took place in the designs of the firearms produced. For both reasons, the Armory saw successive periods of renewal of structures and of equipment, which would then grow obsolete and be replaced again. In this process machines and tools were scrapped or recycled, so remaining material evidence concerning what went on inside the Armory buildings is very scarce. So is written evidence in any detail. What is known about the technique of firearms manufacture in the early nineteenth century mostly derives from records of the United States armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, where techniques for specialization and mechanization of work were carried further than in the smaller private arms factories like Whitney's, even if they had originated in the latter places. So caution should guide inferences drawn from Springfield evidence about what specific techniques were in use at the Whitney Armory at any given time.

In 1825, however, 195 separate operations in musket production were listed in a report about Springfield Armory, and were identified as performed by hand or by waterpower. The number of operations per part ranged from three for the sear to 24 for the barrel. Among them were, for instance, five for the trigger: forging by hand, trimming by water, filing by hand, polishing by water, and hardening by hand.2 At the Whitney Armory, as we currently understand the site, if a trigger went through the same sequence, it would be forged in the east bank forge shop, then taken to the west bank machine and filing shop for trimming, filing and polishing, and returned to the east bank for hardening before finally joining other parts of the "mounting" in the stocking shop on the west bank. Each of the other 29 musket parts mentioned in the list would follow its own sequence of journeys back and forth across the Mill River for shaping, cutting, and heat treating. Although this seems an inefficient arrangement by modern standards of industrial engineering, it was a far less awkward situation than the one at Springfield, in which the water-powered operations were a mile away from the hill-top location of the manual operations.