Yet, due to epidemics and supply problems, requiring extensions from the government, it took his arms factory over ten years to fulfill the contract. For one of his extension requests, Whitney mounted a public demonstration forgovernment officials. He dumped the parts necessary to build ten muskets into a pile and challenged the officials to build ten muskets. The officials completed the task and were instantly convinced of the value of Whitney's production methods.
His extension was granted, his success assured, and arms manufacture was never to be the same. Due to the success of his musket-manufacturing methods, Whitney is credited with pioneering the use of precision interchangeable parts assembled to a final product on a production line.
This method of dividing the labor necessary to build a musket among several workmen was also revolutionary for the times. Whitney also helped develop the machine tool industry by inventing many of the machines required by his new production methods.
Unlike his cotton gin, Whitney's arms manufactures proved to be financially successful. Whitney's methods were the foundation for later assembly line factory production. Toggle navigation. User Contributions: 1.
We often teach students that ineatchangreble parts is an aha moment. However, it's not so simple. The idea is very old. He taught school to earn money to continue his education and graduated from Yale College in It was Whitney's intention to study law, and he undertook to tutor children on a plantation near Savannah, Ga. In Georgia he attracted a great deal of attention by inventing a number of domestic contrivances for his hostess.
He was informed of the need for a machine to clean green-seed cotton. Cotton gins of various designs were then in use in different parts of the world, and models had been imported and tried in Louisiana as early as None had ever worked well, however, and when Whitney arrived in Georgia, cleaning was still a hand job.
It took a slave a full day to clean one pound of cotton. Whitney set his hand to the problem and within ten days had produced a design for a gin. By April he had made one which cleaned 50 pounds a day. Whitney went into partnership in May with Phineas Miller and returned to New England to build his gins.
He received a patent for his machine in March , by which time word of his design had spread and imitations were already on the market. It was the initial hope of Whitney and Miller to operate the gins themselves, thus cornering the cotton market, but a lack of capital and the large number of pirated machines made this impossible. Their device was widely pirated, however, with farmers creating their own version of the gin. Whitney spent years in legal battles and by the turn of the century agreed to license gins at an affordable rate.
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.
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