BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS SAGITTARIUS: ELI WHITNEY

(born Dec. 8, 1765, Westboro, Mass., U.S.—died Jan. 8, 1825, New Haven, Conn.) U.S. inventor, engineer, and manufacturer. He is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin (1793), which led to greatly increased production of the short-staple cotton grown in much of the South, making the region prosperous. The most important innovation credited to Whitney may be the concept of mass production of interchangeable parts. His idea of manufacturing quantities of identical parts for assembly into muskets, after undertaking in 1797 to supply the U.S. government with 10,000 muskets in two years, helped inaugurate the vastly important American System of manufacture.

Copyright © 1994-2008 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.