Not for the Squeamish: Eli Whitney’s Greatest Innovation

Few entrepreneurs in American history are more controversial than Eli Whitney (1765-1825).

This champion of the Early Republic is credited with inventing the cotton gin, a device that revitalized the fortunes of the American South. By launching "King Cotton," however, Whitney is also blamed for enriching slaveowners and extending America's horrific "peculiar institution."

Likewise, Whitney was the Father of Mass Production for being the first to use interchangeable parts in the muskets he manufactured for the US government. "For the initiation of the mass production that has given the United States the highest material standard of living of any country in the world," one biographer concluded, "the nation is indebted to the genius of Eli Whitney."

Or not. Around 1960, a clever MIT technology historian disassembled a batch of Whitney's musket locks and discovered them to be hand-filed, irregular, and marked for specific guns—in other words, not interchangeable at all. Less charitable than the first, this second historian concluded that Whitney had been demoted from "Father of the American System of Manufactures to a fast-talking arms contractor." (Fear not. Whitney died rich and famous. See Chapter 1 of Innovation on Tap.)

Those debates still leave Whitney with his last innovation, little known and never disputed, but perhaps his most remarkable.

It came in the inventor's final years when he was wracked with pain from what we now guess to be an enlarged prostate. 

Squeamish gentlemen should stop here. All illustrations have been censored.  

In between bouts of what he described as "the rack of the Inquisition," Whitney studied every piece of medical literature available, poured over drawings of the human body, and "acted rather as if he himself had been the physician."  

He also thoroughly interrogated his talented doctor, Nathan Smith, the fifth graduate of Harvard Medical School and founder of the Dartmouth, Bowdoin and Yale medical schools. 

Whitney then wrote to London and Paris for materials and, demonstrating the same mechanical brilliance that marked his earlier career, constructed "instruments" that brought him immediate relief.

The delicacy of the time did not permit a full description, but we now presume that Whitney made for himself a kind of flexible catheter, reducing his own pain immensely and perhaps adding two years to his life.

So, while I sit here typing (and squirming just a bit), the whole episode impresses me. We can question the impact of the cotton gin. We can debate the invention of interchangeable parts.

But it's hard not to think that Whitney's most impressive innovation was his last.

Paradigms and Serial Entrepreneurs: The Language of Business

There are certain words and phrases that creep into the business lexicon.  At first they’re clear, useful, and appropriate, but, squeezed beyond their means, become burdensome and hackneyed.

Paradigm is a word like that, and more especially, paradigm shift.  When I first heard it in 1980 or so it was like hearing “weltanschauung” for the first time in high school:  It was so cool we tried to fit it into every conversation (as in "that new Three Dog Night song upended my weltanschauung").  So, too, with paradigm shift.  Pretty soon, every time someone launched a new product, reorganized a department, or entered a new market, they were shifting paradigms.  It got to be silly.

Gettysburg: July 4th, 150 Years Ago

Two kinds of monuments were on display a Gettysburg battlefield this week.

I had an opportunity to visit Gettysburg this week to again walk the battlefield, as I did five years ago, and to admire the extraordinary work being done by the National Park Service and the Gettysburg Foundation to rehabilitate, preserve, protect and interpret this sacred ground.

The three-day battle (Wed-/July 1 to Fri/July 3) ended 150 years ago yesterday with Pickett's Charge, and as Lee's defeated army withdrew, the scene on July 4 was horrific.  We know a great deal about events today (for current reports see here and here and for a great new film by Jake Boritt, see here), but the July 4, 1863 New York Times was still trying to make sense of the battle by presenting news and telegrams (in a kind of Twitter stream) received from various locations.  The headline read like this:

THE GREAT BATTLES.; Our Special Telegrams from the Battle Field to 10 A.M. Yesterday. Full Details of the Battle of Wednesday. No Fighting on Thursday Until Four and a Half, P.M. A Terrible Battle Then Commenced, Lasting Until Dark. The Enemy Repulsed at All Points. The Third Battle Commenced. Yesterday Morning at Daylight. THE REBELS THE ATTACKING PARTY. No Impression Made on Our Lines. The Death of Longstreet,and Barksdale of Mississippi. Other Prominent Rebel Officers Killed or Wounded. A LARGE NUMBER OF PRISONERS. Gen. Sickles' Right Leg Shot Off. OTHER GENERAL OFFICERS WOUNDED. OFFICIAL DISPATCHES FROM GEN. MEADE. THE BATTLE OF WEDNESDAY. REPORTS FROM PHILADELPHIA. THE BATTIE OF THURSDAY. YESTERDAY'S BATTLE. Our Special Telegrams from the Battle Field. NEWS RECEIVED IN WASHINGTON. NEWS RECEIVED IN PHILADELPHIA. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DISPATCHES. REPORTS FROM HARRISBURGH. REPORTS FROM COLUMBIA, PENN. REPORTS FROM BALTIMORE. THE GREAT BATTLE. COL. CROSS, OF NEW-HAMPSHIRE, KILLED.