Business Leaders: A Historical Sketch of Eli Whitney

Abstract

Eli Whitney's America was a nation just recently emerging from its colonial status, and "Yankee ingenuity" would prove essential for it to move from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Whitney was still in college when America's first census, in 1790, showed a total population of 3,231, 533, with over 90 percent of these people engaged in agriculture. The largest city was New York, with a population of 33,131; next came Philadelphia, with 28,522 persons, and then Boston, with a population of 18,300. Together, the three largest U.S. cities had a population that could comfortably be seated in a modern football stadium.

Born December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts, Eli Whitney Jr. was the eldest of Eli and Elizabeth Whitney's four children. Eli's father had a small workshop on their farm, containing basic tools and a lathe for turning chair legs and the younger Whitney learned how to use these tools. He made and repaired violins and demonstrated his entrepreneurial tendencies early. During the Revolutionary War, he discovered that nails brought a high price and talked his father into letting him use the workshop to make nails for resale. After the war, when nails were no longer in such great demand, he noticed that women had started using long pins to keep their hats on their heads and changed his product line to make hat pins.

He aspired to a higher education, but limited family finances delayed his entry into Yale College until 1789, when he was twenty-four years old. His father pledged $1,000 for the four years at Yale, but Eli had to make up the balance of some $600 by tutoring others. At the time, Yale's curriculum provided a classical education, designed to create gentlemen for politics, the ministry, or law, but Eli was not drawn to any of these fields. Unemployed upon graduation in 1792, he was able to gain a tutor's position in the South and traveled to Savannah, Georgia, with another Yale alumnus, Phineas Miller.