Eli whitney biography muskets firing

Whitney thought this process might be done by a simple hand-cranked machine, easy to make, operate and repair. Cotton was fed via a hopper onto a revolving cylinder bristling with short wire hooks to snag the fibre. A mesh allowed the fibre through, but not the seeds, and finally a drum rotating in the opposite direction brushed off and collected the cotton.

The seeds could be used to plant more cotton, or to make cottonseed oil, Whitney's simple cotton gin could enable someone to process 50 pounds of cotton in a day, vastly increasing he profitability of the crop, and transforming the economy of the American South. Whitney gained a patent inbut the planters were reluctant to pay for his machines and service costs because the machine was too easily copied.

Bootleg versions spread through the South, and Whitney was unable to enforce his patent protection in the elis whitney biography muskets firing. These discoveries raise another question. An episode that figures prominently in the Whitney legend is a demonstration that he made in Washington in January before an audience that included President Adams and Presidentelect Jefferson.

In April Congress corrected the defect in the patent law that had prevented Whitney from winning his patent-infringement suits. New suits were filed, and over the next six years Whitney frequently went south to press his claims. This is a plain milling machine which was built prior toand is believed to be the first successful machine of its kind ever made.

The first true milling machine was made not by Whitney, Battison suggests, but by Robert Johnson of Middletown, Connecticut. In the work of contemporary scholars, as the star of Eli Whitney has dimmed, other stars have become visible for the first time. Men like John H. The need for housing to accommodate his workforce was obvious given the distance of the Armory from any other suitable lodgings.

The farm was necessary to provide food for the unmarried workers and probably supplemented the gardens of the married workers living on Armory Street. The Town Bridge Inthe architect Ithiel Town wrote to Eli Whitney requesting a written opinion of the model of a wooden bridge on which Town that year had filed a patent. The resulting web of overlapping triangles affected the distribution of stress to all members, so that the independent action of any one triangle was impossible.

Ordinary pine or spruce planks were used for the diagonals and wooden connecting pins or tree-nails fastened the members at their points of intersection. This "garden trellis fence" concealed a truss design of considerable strength. Not only was Town's design strong and made of economical standard-dimension lumber, it was also easy to build: it did not require fancy mortises and tendons and could thus be erected by a common carpenter's gang; it did not have to be custom-fitted to piers or abutments as arch bridges did.

And the lightness of its timbers reduced the amount of labor that had formerly been needed to erect the pioneer bridges of Town's predecessors, Timothy Palmer and Theodore Burr. Thus the lattice-truss bridge combined the features of strength and economy, which had great appeal, especially to those engaged in the expansion of the nation's transportation network of highways and later, railroads.

Whitneyville InWilliam Giles Munson drafted a now famous portrait of Whitneyville, the manufacturing village that Eli Whitney had developed for 25 years. Whitney died in It did not spring from the mind of any one person.

Eli whitney biography muskets firing

Rather it took form gradually through a remarkable process of cooperation, transfer and convergence. Eli Whitney can be a symbol; he was a man who was involved as an inventor and as an entrepreneur in the whole process of manufacturing. Whitney was not an experienced gunsmith. What he offered was an innovative attitude and an idea by which anything could be mass produced.

His contribution was the production of a new way not only of making things, but of making the machines that make things. Thus, Whitney serves as a model of the eli whitney biography muskets firing of American technology. The farm had a workshop which Eli preferred to the farm work. By the age of 18, he had learned to be a general handy-man as farm living necessitated, but he realized that the farm in Westborough was too small a world for him.

The mechanical work with his hands made his mind search for more in life than farming. Whitney prepared himself for college by teaching school for seven dollars a month and attending Leicester Academy over the next five years. He studied law, but enjoyed mathematics and science courses more. An orrery or planetarium is a clock-like device which was used to teach the movements and positions of the planets.

Whitney spent a week making special tools and then had it working perfectly. While in New Haven, the six foot Whitney made numerous friends among his teachers and the community. For relaxation, he walked the area visiting them, observing the workmen and talking with the owners. Upon graduation inWhitney needed money to repay his father and time to prepare for the bar exam.

A tutoring position was found for him in the South, but it never materialized. Instead, he found himself at Mulberry Grove, a plantation near Savannah, Georgia, owned by Catherine Greene, the widow of General Nathanael Greene, and managed by Phineas Miller, a Yale graduate and former tutor of the Greene children. Here Whitney invented the cotton gin that separated seeds from short-staple cotton.

The invention solved an economic problem for the south by making the crop worth the effort to grow it for the textile market in New England. Whitney and Miller formed a partnership and in JuneWhitney returned to New Haven to take out his patent and to begin manufacturing the gins. The cotton gin did not bring the partners the expected fortune, however.

A patent was obtained but the problems of getting the gins into production allowed competing gin makers to beat him to the planters. His factory was located at the corner of Wooster and Chestnut Streets; here he improvised his own equipment and trained his workers. Whitney intended that the workers would each work on one part of the gin; the parts would be assembled to complete the whole.

Often he would lose men because they were not happy working on the separate parts, but as craftsmen were used to involvement with the entire product; others migrated westward to find new opportunities for their skills. Whitney was in a race with time to get the gins on the market. But during the summer ofepidemics of scarlet and yellow fever swept New Haven with dying in the city, forcing Whitney to close the shop; workmen were scarce.

A year later,while Whitney was away from the shop, the men, taking advantage of the easy working atmosphere, went out for a late breakfast.