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It is an unfortunate reality that an invention is seldom named for the person who invented it. Most often, credit goes to the person who has turned the invention into an innovation.  As someone (sorry somebody, I couldn't find you anywhere) once put it : "Invention is turning money into ideas. Innovation is turning ideas into money."

It is clear from the evidence that Eli Whitney, the aristocratic gentleman whose portait appears here, did invent the cotton gin, the  machine which turned  the cotton industry in America's southern states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, into a booming one. Southern planters at the time had a problem: too much tobacco. The surplus brought down prices and over-production had exhausted the soil. Cotton might have been a suitable alternative, but the climate was suited only to short-staple cotton, which, unlike its long-staple cousin grown in coastal areas, required a labour-intensive process in order to separate the fluffy lint from the sticky green seeds it contained. Even in an economy which relied on cheap slave labour, this was not viable.

Whitney came up with the idea for his gin (an archaic word for engine or machine) while observing a cat trying to pull a chicken through a wire fence. In the same way that the cat was only able to extract feathers from the bird, Whitney's gin used a series of hooks to pull cotton fibres through a fine mesh. The seeds, too large to fit through the holes, were left behind.

Whitney was fully expecting to make a fortune from his gin when he applied for a patent on October 28, 1793 and wrote to  his father: ‘Tis generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by it."

But it was not to be. Whitney and his business partner, Phineas Miller  adopted a faulty business model. They decided that, instead of manufacturing the gins and selling them to the growers, they would make the gins and charge to do the cleaning. The growers felt that they were being ripped off – Whitney and Miller took two bales out of every five as payment – and proceeded to make their own, slightly-modified, versions. Whitney's patent was not honoured until after 1800, when he was able to collect patent fees in some states, but his patent expired in 1807. When his appeal to have the patent renewed was denied, he wrote, "an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor."

Whitney seems to have learnt from his mistake. In 1803, he began promoting the idea of "interchangeable parts", a concept which he latched onto through an association with Thomas Jefferson, who was president at the time. Jefferson had seen a demonstration in Paris in 1790, by a gunsmith called Honoré Blanc. Blanc made 1 000 muskets, disassembled them and then placed the parts in bins. He called together a group of academics, politicians, and military men and then re-assembled muskets from parts drawn at random from the bins.  Blanc's aim was to prove that if parts were identical, there would be no need to return a weapon to its maker if it needed repairing. This idea is fundamental to the process of mass production, although it would be many years before the requisite technology and skill was developed to carry it out.

In 1808, Whitney duplicated the demonstration before the US Congress and made such an impression that he was was awarded a contract by the government to produce four thousand muskets. Whitney profited handsomely and died a wealthy man in 1825.

According to historian, Ken Adler, Whitney was not completely honest in his dealings. The muskets that Whitney brought before Congress had been crafted so carefully that it was a dead cert that their parts would be interchangeable. The demonstration was a fake.

Whitney took eight years to deliver the muskets and when they materialised, their parts were not interchangeable at all!




PICTURE:
The famous Indian Rhinoplasty (reproduced in the October 1794 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine of London) Science Museum, sciencemuseum.org.uk