Eli Whitney was born in Westboro, Massachusetts on December 8, 1765 and died on Jan. 8, 1825. At a young age, Eli Whitney showed unusual mechanical ability. This ability kept him employed making and fixing various machines and paid his way through Yale University. Eli graduated in 1792 where he then traveled to Savannah, Georgia, where he had plans to teach while studying law (Travelers, 684). While in Georgia, Whitney met Phineas Miller, another Yale graduate who was close to his age who managed a plantation owned by the widow of the American Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. Catherine Greene employed Whitney to solve several mechanical problems (Foner, 1150). Eli Whitney then found an opportunity that was more to his liking and promised great rewards. After learning that the tedious and time-consuming task of picking the seeds out of cotton fiber blocked the commercial production of short-staple, gree

After the constant legal battles over the patent of cotton gin, Whitney turned his mechanical genius to the manufacture of firearms. At the time, skilled craftsmen made muskets one at a time. This meant that each firearm was unique and if it were to malfunction or break a certain part, its replacement parts had to be individually made to fit that particular musket or firearm. Whitney came into the picture when he transformed his arms factory in New Haven, Connecticut, to a produce musket parts that were precisely machined so that they were identical and thus interchangeable (Foner, 1150). In 1797 he received a contract to supply the U.S. government with ten thousand muskets in two years. When compared with the productivity of other well known musket manufactures at the time, two national armories had only produced one thousand muskets in the previous three years (Travelers 684). Whitney had a great task to cover, and due to his method of the production line he proved to be successful. With Whitney’s success with the manufacturing of muskets, he is credited with pioneering the use of precision interchangeable parts assembled to a final product on a production line. The production line method is the method of dividing the labor necessary

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