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