[This coming
weekend will mark the 250th
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 19th 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 19th 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?
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