Eli Whitney and the Gun Factory

The cotton gin is the invention everyone remembers. Eli Whitney built his prototype at a Georgia plantation in seventeen ninety-three, applied for a patent in the fall of seventeen ninety-three, receiving it the following spring, and watched as the machine changed the economy of the American South almost overnight. Cotton that had taken a worker a full day to clean by hand could now be processed in minutes. Exports surged from less than five hundred thousand pounds in seventeen ninety-three to ninety-three million pounds by eighteen ten. The gin made cotton profitable on a scale that made slavery economically catastrophic to abolish, from the point of view of those who owned the people doing the labor. Whitney's fortune was elusive, his patent was widely infringed and difficult to enforce, but the machine's consequences were vast.

What fewer people know is what Whitney did next. He moved back to Connecticut and built a gun factory at the base of East Rock along the Mill River, in a village north of New Haven that still bears his name. In January of seventeen ninety-eight, he signed a government contract to produce ten thousand muskets. He was late on delivery by nearly a decade, finally delivering around eighteen oh nine. But the factory he built to do it became something important on its own terms.

Whitney championed the idea of interchangeable parts, manufacturing each component to a standard, so that any trigger would fit any lock, any lock any stock. The concept had been explored by French and European gunsmiths before him, but Whitney promoted it aggressively and the federal government eventually built it into its manufacturing requirements.

The Eli Whitney Museum stands at the site today.