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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994
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Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:34 pm Post subject: Do you love Eli Whitney as much as I do? |
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Last Saturday I bought a computer table (W71,000!!!) with an extra sliding table so I have a place to work right at my elbow, at Costco and a computer chair. They were delivered in boxes on Monday and I got to spend my Tuesday assembling them.
I have to say that Eli Whitney deserves a huge THANK YOU for making my life more pleasant. Everything went together without a hitch. No missing parts, no directions in butchered, incomprehensible English, no left-over pieces. Both companies even included the tools needed.
Life with a new table and chair is wonderful.
Thank you, Mr. Whitney:
By the late 1790s,... The new American government, realizing the need to prepare for war, began to rearm. The War Department issued contracts for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets. Whitney, who had never made a gun in his life, obtained a contract in January, 1798 to deliver ten to fifteen thousand muskets in 1800. He had not mentioned interchangeable parts at that time. Ten months later, Treasury Secretary Wolcott sent him a "foreign pamphlet on arms manufacturing techniques," possibly one of Honor� Blanc's reports, after which Whitney first began to talk about interchangeability. After spending most of 1799-1801 in cotton gin litigation, Whitney began promoting the idea of interchangeable parts, and even arranged a public demonstration of the concept in order to gain time. He did not deliver on the contract until 1809, but then spent the rest of his life publicizing the idea of interchangeability. |
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huffdaddy
Joined: 25 Nov 2005
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Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:44 pm Post subject: |
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Short answer: no
http://www.eliwhitney.org/cotton.htm
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However, like many inventors, Whitney (who died in 1825) could not have foreseen the ways in which his invention would change society for the worse. The most significant of these was the growth of slavery. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor. In 1790 there were six slave states; in 1860 there were 15. From 1790 until Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, Southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860 approximately one in three Southerners was a slave. |
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