Eli Whitney saw replicas of his cotton gin at work on countless southern plantations. However, they were built without honoring the patent he held on the device that is, without his making any profit on this profitable idea. This prompted Whitney to remark that, "an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor."
Learning from this experience, Whitney turned his attention away from inventions and to his concept of mass production. In 1797, the government was worried about possible war with France. Forty thousand more muskets were needed than the
1,000-per-three-years produced by the national armory. Whitney reasoned that musket production was so slow because each musket was handmade, unique, and therefore impossible to construct or repair, except with parts specially made for each unit.
The problem could be solved, he believed, if all the musket parts could be made uniform and manufactured by machine tools which could be operated by unskilled laborers. Then all the parts would be interchangeable, and anyone could assemble (as well as repair) a musket from a large supply of parts.
With this idea in mind, he proposed delivering 10,000 muskets in two years. However, the time it would take to deliver the 10,000 muskets would stretch from his estimated two years to more than ten this due to circumstances not connected to his proposed method. But in 1801, Whitney was able to prove his point in front of President-elect Thomas Jefferson and other officials, when those present randomly selected parts from dis-assembled muskets and, from them, assembled complete muskets. It was the beginning of the American system of mass production.
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