The Dawn of Innovation (20 page)

For a century and a half after his death, Eli Whitney was virtually canonized as the Father of American Technology. According to the traditional story, Whitney was the inventor of the cotton gin, which transformed the antebellum South (and unfortunately reinvigorated the institution of slavery); he was the first person to machine-produce precisely fitting interchangeable parts for muskets and was the inventor of critical new machine tools, like the celebrated Whitney milling machine.

The Whitney role in military manufacturing came under withering challenge in the 1960s. The revisionists charged that Whitney's pretension to making arms with interchangeable parts was merely a ploy to justify extensions of his contracts. Indeed, he had little idea of how to manufacture muskets at all, much less how to blaze new trails in making them. He was unconscionably late in fulfilling his arms contract, in part because he spent so much of his time pursuing his cotton gin profits.
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That harsh view of Whitney as manufacturer has moderated considerably in recent years. While it's true that Whitney made few contributions to machining technology, most of the extreme claims for his accomplishments were made by others, often long after his death. The traditional source for the story that he claimed to manufacture interchangeable parts appears to be itself a partial fabrication.
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While he did have a rocky start on his first musket contract, so did many other contractors. The current consensus is that Whitney was quite a competent manufacturer and one of the earliest advocates for mass production by machinery, if not expressly for interchangeable parts—in short, a respectable figure, if not the demigod of legend.

My own view is that in his early career Whitney was indeed something of a flimflam man; some recent work even raises doubts as to whether he invented his cotton gin (see Appendix). And I think the record supports the charge that he dangled the promise of machined interchangeable parts to gain extensions on his contracts. But it's also true that he was a talented
artisan and entrepreneur, and once he focused on actually building his weapons—about 1805, when he turned forty—he proved himself to be a good manufacturer and was regarded as such by his peers and armory officials. While it is almost impossible to trace weapon types to specific battles, there is decent circumstantial evidence that Whitney's muskets were used by a good portion of the troops in some of the hottest infantry engagements of the War of 1812 and that they performed as expected.

There is nothing contradictory in such a portrait. Whitney was a hyper-talented farm boy with a modestly connected father. Older than most of his classmates when he entered Yale, he was a good engineer and metalworker, articulate, a formidable salesman, and desperate to succeed. In the first dozen years or so after graduation, he was very much on the make and sometimes played fast and loose with the truth, but as he matured and focused on a business he was good at, he did well.

Whitney finished Yale in 1792 with a vague idea of becoming a schoolmaster. The president of Yale referred him to a tutoring job on a Southern plantation and introduced him to Phineas Miller, a Yale alumnus of about Whitney's age who had been tutoring on a plantation for several years. Whitney went south with Miller with the intention of acclimating on Miller's plantation before taking up his own duties.

The record is mostly silent on Whitney's first year in the South. But he never made it to his tutoring job, and a year after his arrival, he patented his cotton gin in partnership with Miller. Their business plan was to leverage control over ginning technology to create ginning centers throughout the cotton country, charging 40 percent of the ginned cotton. Whitney returned to New Haven to manufacture the gins, while Miller created and marketed the local centers. Financing came primarily from the mistress of Miller's plantation, Constance Greene, a widow whom Miller eventually married.

The business was a failure. Their pricing was extortionate, and their gin, while a substantial advance, was relatively easy to replicate. The next few years were a nightmare of endless patent litigation, with few victories, rising indebtedness, and the looming bankruptcy of Mrs. Greene. The
French war scare in 1798 came just as Whitney was reaching the end of his rope. As he later wrote to a friend, “Bankruptcy & ruin were constantly staring me in the face.... Loaded with a Debt of 3 or 4000 Dollars . . . I knew not which way to turn.”
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Then Whitney came across a federal circular recruiting gun manufacturers. He wrote to the Treasury secretary, Oliver Wolcott, another Yale man, that his gin factory had been idled by disruptions in trade and that he proposed to “undertake to Manufacture Ten or Fifteen Thousand Stand
^af
of Arms.”
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Since the Whitney gin had been widely publicized in the North, Wolcott responded immediately with an invitation to Washington, “knowing your skill in mechanick.”
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Barely a month later, Whitney had a contract for 10,000 stand of muskets on a French pattern, to be delivered in stages over the next two years. The total contract price was $134,000, with a $10,000 advance for tooling: it was the largest of the private gun contracts and the first with an advance. The only objection within the administration was that the schedule was unrealistic, which was true.
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But the schedule was furthest from Whitney's mind: as he wrote to his friend, in the nick of time he had won a large contract by which “I obtained some thousands of Dollars in advance which has saved me from ruin.”
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Whitney had minimal acquaintance with gun making, and set off on a tour of arms makers to learn more about the craft. He must have realized early that the delivery schedule was impossible, and as he missed his contract dates, year after year, he defended his tardiness by claiming that he was really engaged in a kind of R&D project: “One of my primary objectives is to form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion—which when accomplished will give expedition, uniformity and exactness to the whole.... In short the tools which I contemplate are similar to an engraving on copper plate from
which may be taken a great number of impressions precisely alike.”
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Each time, he got a pass and sometimes even a further advance.

In Whitney lore, there was a climactic meeting in Washington in 1801 in which Whitney “made a triumphal demonstration of his musket” to a galaxy of top officials including Adams and Jefferson. There, “by allowing the officials to assemble the parts of the locks—selecting the constituent parts at random—he dramatized the concept of interchangeability and made its advantages obvious.”
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There was such a meeting, and it was indeed a major event, but there is little firsthand information on its details. Whitney merely reported that he went to Washington and “carried on a musket of my manufacture & several samples of Locks &c.” Whitney's congressman also attended and wrote that the samples “met universal approbation.”
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But there is no evidence for the story that officials around the table, or anyone else, reassembled locks.

Whatever did or did not happen in Washington, however, Whitney
did
dangle the promise of interchangeability. There's no other way to interpret the “copper plate” letter, and all early accounts cite it in that context.
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A few weeks before his Washington meeting, moreover, Whitney asked for a reference letter from his friend Decius Wadsworth, a Yale classmate of Miller and the military's head arms inspector. Wadsworth opened by pronouncing Whitney's muskets to be possibly “superior to any muskets for common use ever yet fabricated in any country.” And went on:

That is a very large claim and, if taken literally, was simply false. Wadsworth, indeed, having made the requested representation, carefully dissociated himself from it. His next sentence is that “I am of the opinion that there is more to please the imagination than of real utility in the plan yet it affords an incontestible proof of [Whitney's] . . . superior skill as a workman.”
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Jefferson, in any case, came away with exactly the impression Whitney was hoping for. He later wrote to Madison that Whitney had invented machinery “for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal, that take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces which come to hand.”
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In short,
something
happened in Washington to convince Jefferson that Whitney had achieved effective interchangeability, and once that impression was made, it was amplified on every retelling.

It is also striking how lightly Whitney wore his promises. He had assured Wolcott, who had been embarrassed by his nonperformance, that “nothing shall induce me to shrink from the task or for a moment divert my attention from its final accomplishment.”
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But he really meant “unless something better comes along.” In the fall of 1801, his new advances in hand, he got word of the possibility of a lucrative settlement on the cotton gin patent. Whitney left for the southlands late in the year, did not return until May (long after the gin business was over), and took similar absences for the same reason over the next several years.
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A few years after that, it seems, he finally got serious, mostly giving up on the cotton gin litigation and devoting his formidable intelligence and mechanical gifts more or less full-time to the business of producing arms. While there is little evidence of his making any mechanical breakthroughs, he was a good manager and quickly got to a steady-state production of about 2,000 muskets a year. Several musket modifications Whitney made on his own initiative, like making the pan of hardened brass and designing a simplified hammer shape for easier machining, were later incorporated into the standard musket specifications.
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How did America's muskets perform on the battlefield? The 1814 theater on the Niagara Peninsula separating Lakes Ontario and Erie was the
war's fiercest. From July through November, British regulars and American ground forces were squared off in the bloodiest and most sustained fighting of the war. The battles of Chippawa and Lundys Lane and the siege of Fort Erie were the most intense set-piece engagements, but there was nearly constant hostile contact in the intervals between. The Americans achieved a glorious tie, winning about as many head-to-head encounters as they lost: a performance that weighed heavily in the British decision to back away from the war.

The military historian Richard Barbuto, who has written the closest-to-the-ground history of the Niagara campaigns, told me that he never saw a report of a battle lost because muskets failed. Soldiers took dreadful care of their weapons, and especially broke bayonets. But while repair logistics were often difficult, the absence of postbattle complaints suggests that the muskets mostly performed as expected.
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Were any of the muskets Whitney's? It seems so, for in the years just before and during the war, Whitney sold 5,000 muskets to the New York state militia, who were deeply involved at Niagara. In the early days of the war, the New Yorkers had performed poorly, but by 1814 they were battle-hardened veterans who bore a heavy share of the fighting. Unusually, the Niagara ground commander over regulars and militia alike was a New York militia general, Jacob Brown. He had earned the post by his aggressiveness in seeking out and confronting the enemy, and he didn't hesitate to place his own state's soldiers in the thick of engagements. Daniel Tompkins, the New York governor, was a strong supporter of the war, close to Brown, and well informed on events at the front. Tompkins knew Whitney muskets, and in late August 1814, at the height of the fighting, he intervened forcefully to break a bureaucratically imposed blockade on their sale, taking every one he could get at the state's expense and without inspection.
^ag
There could hardly be a better reference.
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By 1814, Whitney was an established manufacturer with as much experience in musket making as anyone else in the country. He was turning
out inelegant, inexpensive, quasi-mass-produced weapons that worked as they were supposed to. The postwar Whitney correspondence with Wadsworth and other armory and Ordnance officials confirms that he had become one of the half dozen or so private contractors they had come to treat as sound and reliable men. Besides Whitney, there was Simeon North, Lemuel Pomeroy, Asa Waters, Robert Johnson, Nathan Starr, and a few others. Ordnance maintained a constant correspondence with all of them, trading information on machines, waterpowers, iron and steel, and other topics of the trade. Whitney's letters are terse and businesslike, with none of the high-flown rhetoric that the younger Whitney used to impress his funders.

In the first flush of revisionism on Whitney in the 1960s, the contractor Whitney was often invidiously compared to was Simeon North. North became a great gun maker, but earlier in his career had some misadventures of his own.

Simeon North was born the same year as Eli Whitney, and in much the same milieu, on a middle-class but still tightly circumstanced farm in Connecticut. He had a standard farm boy's education—no thoughts of Yale—and was hard at work from an early age. His intelligence is obvious, and from what little else is known of him, he was literate, genial, even-tempered, and taciturn. He enjoyed good health throughout his life and died after a short illness at age eighty-six. In a picture taken late in his life, he looks pure New England oak: erect, strongly built, firm mouth, looking directly at the camera. One vanity was his adoption of the title “Colonel” from a brief, and mostly honorary, stint in the state militia.