15 Facts About Eli Whitney

1.

Eli Whitney continued making arms and inventing until his death in 1825.

2.

Eli Whitney prepared for Yale at Leicester Academy and under the tutelage of Rev Elizur Goodrich of Durham, Connecticut, he entered in the fall of 1789 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792.

3.

Eli Whitney expected to study law but, finding himself short of funds, accepted an offer to go to South Carolina as a private tutor.

4.

Mrs Greene invited Eli Whitney to visit her Georgia plantation, Mulberry Grove.

5.

Eli Whitney is most famous for two innovations which came to have significant impacts on the United States in the mid-19th century: the cotton gin and his advocacy of interchangeable parts.

6.

Eli Whitney occasionally told a story wherein he was pondering an improved method of seeding the cotton when he was inspired by observing a cat attempting to pull a chicken through a fence, and able to only pull through some of the feathers.

7.

Eli Whitney applied for the patent for his cotton gin on October 28,1793, and received the patent on March 14,1794, but it was not validated until 1807.

8.

Eli Whitney has often been incorrectly credited with inventing the idea of interchangeable parts, which he championed for years as a maker of muskets; however, the idea predated Whitney, and Whitney's role in it was one of promotion and popularizing, not invention.

9.

Eli Whitney inspired others, including Honore Blanc and Louis de Tousard, to work further on the idea, and on shoulder weapons as well as artillery.

10.

Eli Whitney had not mentioned interchangeable parts at that time.

11.

Eli Whitney thus made early contributions to both the concepts of cost accounting, and economic efficiency in manufacturing.

12.

Machine tool historian Joseph W Roe credited Whitney with inventing the first milling machine circa 1818.

13.

Subsequent work by other historians suggests that Eli Whitney was among a group of contemporaries all developing milling machines at about the same time, and that the others were more important to the innovation than Eli Whitney was.

14.

Eli Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8,1825, in New Haven, Connecticut, just a month after his 59th birthday.

15.

Eli Whitney left a widow and his four children behind.