Eli Whitney: The Determined Innovator of the 18th Century

Eli Whitney played an important role during the industrial revolution, and through some challenges, Whitney was able to create one of the greatest innovations of the eighteenth century. Eli Whitney was born during the revolutionary war in 1765, and has had an interest in machines and technology as an early teen. Some of the challenges he faced occurred before Whitney even started building his famous cotton gin. Whitney attended the prestigious Yale University in his twenties, and when graduating at age 27, he was broke. Eli Whitney was able to turn all of his challenges into later accomplishments by staying determined and continuing with his technological advances of creating the cotton gin and later the creation of interchangeable parts with firearms.

Graduating with zero money from Yale, Whitney was faced with a challenge of finding a job. He ventured down south to take

Immediately, he was faced with making 10,000 muskets in a span of two years for the United States. This proved to be a challenge for Whitney as this task took him upwards of 10 years instead of the original two. He created the idea of interchangeable parts, which changed the way muskets were built. The war with France looked promising in the near future, so Whitney must be able to produce these muskets in time, and had a lot of pressure on him.(100) Although Whitney mainly took this contract from the government to make money, he was satisfied with helping out his government in any way possible. Mainly, he helped by building muskets. “ His imagination had enabled him to see that machines could produce muskets of greater precision than could the most carefully trained hands, and faster than an army of gunsmiths.”(108) Building these muskets with interchangeable parts proved to have a major impact for the United States, and was also one of Whitney’s many