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| US inventor
who in 1794 patented the cotton gin, a device for separating cotton fibre
from its seeds. Also a manufacturer of firearms, he created a standardization
system that was the precursor of the assembly line. Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, and studied law at Yale. His cotton gin was so easy to copy and manufacture that he eventually gave up defending his patent and in 1798 turned to the manufacture of firearms in New Haven, Connecticut. He used machine tools to make arms with fully interchangeable parts, and introduced division of labour and mass production. In 1818 he made a small milling machine, with a power-driven table that moved horizontally beneath and at right angles to a rotating cutter. |