Production Man

WHITTLING BOY--Roger Burlingame --Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Concerning Eli Whitney, scholars have ginned from history only a few pale fluffs of information. Roger Burlingame, social-minded historian of U. S. invention (Engines of Democracy, etc.), has woven these factual fluffs, plus a few skeins of imaginative ersatz, into an attractive fabric which is part novel, part biography: Whittling Boy--the Story of Eli Whitney.

Young Eli Whitney developed his mechanical skill in the rustic smithies which forged muskets for General Washington's troops. But when peace came, folk expected their new Confederation to become a great nation through the inventions of lawyers, not of tinkerers. So, despite his gift for whittling and smithing, Eli went to Yale College where he studied mathematics, then to Georgia to teach school and study law. He lived on the plantation of General Nathanael Greene's charming widow. She urged her whittling friend to devise a machine for cleaning cotton. Author Burlingame thinks that any Yankee tinkerer, set down amid the lazy, genteel Georgians and their seedy bolls, could have invented the cotton gin.

But Whitney's genius was far more distinguished. He returned to New Haven, struggled desperately against widespread infringement of his patents (and against his own desire for marriage). To produce cotton gins of uniform quality in large numbers he was slowly working out the division of labor, the principle of interchangeable parts which underlie industrial mass production.

In 1798 the young republic, fearing a warlord of continental Europe, undertook its first full-fledged defense program. From the Federal Government in Philadelphia Whitney got a contract for 10,000 muskets. But New Haven whispered of the queer doings at the new arms factory: Whitney wasn't building muskets at all, he was building machines. When delivery was called for, Whitney could show only 500 muskets and a weird machine shop.

In muddy Washington there was disappointment, doubt, ill will over his failure. So Whitney went to the White House with a boxful of ten gunstocks, ten barrels, ten triggers, etc., let President John Adams, General William North, Thomas Jefferson, other awed officials choose at random the parts from which a single excellent musket was quickly assembled. It was an unprecedented event in military and industrial history. The Government leniently extended Whitney's contract. His machine shop hummed on.

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