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Southern planters were ultimately able to reap huge financial windfalls from the invention while Whitney made almost no net profit, even after he was able to receive monetary settlements from various states.
By the mids, Southern cotton production had risen by a stratospheric amount from the previous century, with more than a million bales of cotton being produced by With people needed to harvest the crop, greed fueled an industry-stifling and dehumanizing slaveholding culture, with around a third of the U. Southern population enslaved by With a potential war with France on the horizon, the government looked to private contractors to supply firearms.
Whitney promised to manufacture 10, rifles within a two-year period of time, and the government accepted his bid in At the time, muskets were generally assembled in their entirety by individual craftsmen, with each weapon having its own distinct design. Setting up base in Connecticut, Whitney devised milling machines that would allow laborers to slice metal by a pattern and produce one particular, specific part of a weapon.
When put together, each part, though made separately, became a working model. Whitney still faced many challenges with this new system.
After the first few years of production, he was able to produce only a fraction of the promised order. It took 10 years for him to complete the manufacture of 10, arms. Yet even with the delay, Whitney soon received another order for 15, muskets, which he was able to supply in two years. There is record of other inventors having come up with the idea of interchangeable parts, and there is some skepticism on how truly interchangeable each musket piece was that came from the initial Whitney millers.
Whitney also constructed a group of worker residences that would come to be known as Whitneyville, Connecticut. He instituted a series of ethical guidelines meant to promote harmonious employee-employer relations, with roots in Puritanical beliefs. They tell about one of Jefferson Davis's slaves who invented a new screw propeller for steam-driven ships.
He couldn't patent it, of course; but it served the South during the war that was fought to keep him a slave. The first patent to a black freeman was given in to Henry Blair for his new seed-planter. But records of patents, even to freed blacks, are rare before the Civil War.
For one thing, black inventors usually put their patents in the name of a white lawyer. That improved chances for acceptance of their invention. The lesson in this is that disenfranchised minorities look unproductive because they have no franchise. Historians of technology are just beginning to see that the slave inventors we know about are only the tip of a very large iceberg. I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
James, P. For more on this business, see Episode This was a very early episode in this series. As it turns out, the story of Whitney getting his cotton gin idea from Sam is probably apocryphal.
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