Detail of frontispiece from Memoir of Eli Whitney, ESQ. by Denison Olmsted, 1846.
Eli Whitney (1765-1825)
Eli Whitney was a scholar, inventor, and entrepreneur who helped revolutionize American production methods. After graduating from Yale in 1792, Whitney moved to Savannah, Georgia, to tutor school children in hopes of saving enough money to put himself through law school. Exposure to Southern agricultural practices gave Whitney the idea for the cotton gin, an invention that boosted local cotton production and fostered the creation of large slave-based cotton plantations. Whitney returned to Connecticut in 1793 and began manufacturing firearms in New Haven in 1798. Here his inventive nature proved profitable once again. Whitney helped develop a series of rifles made with interchangeable parts that helped give rise to the mass production of firearms in Connecticut.
