Biography

Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, the son of a prosperous farmer, and at the age of 14 he was operating a profitable nail-manufacturing business. He worked as a farm labourer and schoolteacher to save to go to Yale and in 1792 he graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa.

Although Whitney is chiefly remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin, his importance to management is the introduction of interchangeable manufactured parts.

Before Whitney, craftsman-made parts of manufactured assemblies such as muskets had a wide variation in the size of parts, and when the gun broke on the battlefield, it had to be sent back to the workshop to be repaired. However, if the parts are identical and machine-made, items can be repaired in the field from a box of spare parts.

In reality the Frenchman Honore Blanc preceded Whitney's method, as did Venetian shipbuilders as far back as the 10th Century. But it was Whitney who popularised the concept. Interchangeable parts are important to managers because they made the multiplication of productivity possible.

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