November 10, 2015: American Inventors: Eli Whitney’s Effects

[This coming weekend will mark the 250^th birthday of Robert Fulton, about whose influential invention I’ll write in Friday’s post. All week I’ll AmericanStudy some of our most complex and significant inventors—and I’d love for you to share your thoughts on them and other inventors (and inventions) for an innovative crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the famous inventor’s more and less well-known effects, and what they have in common.

Eli Whitney never intended to end up on a Georgia plantation at all, much less to develop an invention that would revolutionize life in that Southern American setting. Trained in law at Yale, the New England native was led by financial exigency to take a job as a tutor in South Carolina; on the way down he met the owner of Mulberry Grove plantation, Revolutionary hero Nathanael Greene’s widow Catharine Littlefield Greene, and was persuaded by her to visit the plantation. The visit led to a business relationship with plantation manager (and Greene’s future husband) Phineas Miller, and through that relationship Whitney was encouraged to pursue his idea for a new, much more efficient form of harvesting cotton. That idea developed into the cotton gin, an invention that changed the cotton industry and American agriculture forever—and one that, most historians believe, allowed for the early 19^th century significant expansion of the slave system that deepened the sectional divide and ultimately precipitated the Civil War.

At the same time that Whitney’s most famous invention (albeit one for which he fought for the patent for the rest of his life) greatly aided the Southern cause, however, his other most prominent idea contributed significantly to the Northern one. Historians no longer believe that Whitney originated the concept of interchangeable parts in the production of weaponry, as was the theory for a time. But like Thomas Jefferson with the polygraph, Whitney’s support for this technological innovation helped bring it to America and popularize it, and certainly he applied it to the manufacture of muskets and other firearms in important new ways that greatly changed that rapidly evolving industry. Indeed, despite the prominence of the cotton gin in both its own era and our collective memories of the Early Republic, it was really as an arms manufacturer that Whitney made his reputation and fortune in the early 19^th century—and in that role he proved just as influential as in the agricultural realm, as the use of interchangeable parts in rifles has been cited as contributing to one of the North’s principal advantages (its far greater and newer supply of weaponry) at the onset of and throughout the Civil War.

So Eli Whitney invented a new technology that helped expand the South’s slave system, and also supported and amplified another new technology that contributed to the North’s eventual military defeat of that system. In that way, the effects of this pioneering figure’s innovations could be seen as a historical wash. But in another way, I would argue that both cases illustrate just how much invention comes down to the law of unintended consequences, rather than to the control and power our narratives often attribute to genius inventors. As is so often the case, Whitney’s inventions themselves were at least partly accidents, the results of unexpected turns in his life that could easily have gone other ways. But even after those inventions had come into existence, it’s fair to say that their most significant effects and meanings were not ones that their inventor could have predicted, and thus that the way inventions become a part of our history and society are both more random and (more saliently) more communal than those narratives of individual genius tend to credit. If Whitney’s example can help us better remember that, than that would be a particularly meaningful effect.

Next inventive post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other inventors or inventions you’d highlight?