Re: Reserve Demobilization System Built Around Reused Ada Code

[brh@hare.udev.cdc.com (brian r hanson x6062)]

 
|> I'll try Eli Whitney for $0.02.
|> 
|> Funny thing is that his two contributions to science and technology were
|> the guns that made the Civil War so bloody, and the cotton gin that made
|> using slave labor so cost-ineffective that slavery would have passed away
|> of its own accord if given just a little more time. :-(.

According to a book I have just been reading, you are wrong.  Eli Whitney was
not the first to have the idea of building bunches of identical parts and
manufacturing stuff by putting together these parts.  It was used in europe
some years earlier.  It also seems that his parts were not very identical but
he did manage to obtain quite a lot of money from the government for this.

Eli also did not invent the cotton gin but made an improvement to an existing
gin to get it to work with the american cotton plants which was in turn made
workable by yet another person.

Finally, the connection between the cotton gin and the deepening of slavery
is also not quite so clear cut according to this book.  Out side the deep
south the number of slaves per farm was lower in the years after the gin
was introduced.

Brian Hanson