Though perhaps best known for his invention of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney's greatest innovation pioneered the era of mass production and modern manufacturing methods. In 1798, the federal government--fearing war with France--awarded Eli Whitney a contract of $134,000 to produce and deliver 10,000 muskets. With this contract, Whitney refined and successfully applied his revolutionary, "Uniformity System" of manufacturing interchangeable components. Faced with skepticism and delays in implementing his new production method, Whitney convinced President John Adams of the great significance of his innovative approach by demonstrating that randomly selected parts could be fitted together into a complete, working musket lock. Though it took ten years to deliver the last of the muskets, the federal government's investment and support enabled Whitney to prove the feasibility of his system and establish it as the leading source of the modern assembly line. He demonstrated that machine tools--manned by workers who did not need the highly specialized skills of gunsmiths--could produce standardized parts to exact specifications, and that any part could be used as a component of any musket. The firearms factory he built in New Haven, Conn., was thus one of the first to use MASS PRODUCTION methods.
