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least two-thirds of whom worked producing cotton. And the profits that dramatically improved as a result, of course, all went to the plantation owners. So this remarkable piece of new technology, in addition to driving overall U.S. economic growth, was responsible as well for making slavery a foundation of the U.S. economy.
    Eli Whitney also happens to be a fabulous case study of the overenthusiasm and overpromising that surround technological progress—especially at moments of revolutionary economic change, such as the early nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. We learn in school that Whitney came up with another, more foundational piece of the industrial revolution: manufacturing things out of standardized bits and pieces, interchangeable parts, from gears and levers then to Ethernet plugs and semiconductor chips now.
    Coming off the success of the cotton gin, young Whitney convinced the new U.S. government that he was their man to mass-produce ten thousand muskets, even though he knew nothing about making guns. Two years later, after failing to meet his contractual deadline, he went to Washington to keep his remorseful buyers on the hook. His state-of-the-art musket was taking a bit longer than expected to get right, he told President Adams and President-elect Jefferson and the secretary of war, because it would consist entirely of fantastic new interchangeable parts, meaning that manufacture would be cheaper and faster, and repair easier. He spread a hundred metal pieces on a tabletop. Sirs, here before you are all the ordinary parts from ten of my new gunlocks, he explained. Hand me one of each, any you wish, at random, and from those, using only a screwdriver, I shall assemble a working apparatus! Which he proceeded to do, wowing everyone, getting his deadline extended, more money, and a contract for still more muskets.
    Whitney’s demonstration in Washington, however, had been almost all show. According to the MIT technology historian who wrote the definitive account of that episode, “Whitney must have staged his famous 1801 demonstration with specimens specially prepared for the occasion. It appears that Whitney purposely duped government authorities” into believing “that he had successfully developed a system for producing uniform parts.” ( Vaporware would be the word coined two centuries later.)
    The inventor and nail manufacturer Jefferson, who’d been excited for years about the prospect of interchangeable parts, was wildly enthusiastic. Not long after the faked demo, he wrote a letter of introduction on Whitney’s behalf to the governor of Virginia, his protégé James Monroe. Whitney “has invented moulds & machines for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal,” the president wrote, and thus “furnishes the US. with muskets, undoubtedly the best they receive.” None of that was true. In fact, Whitney wouldn’t deliver any muskets to the government until 1809, nine years later, and interchangeable parts weren’t perfected until after his death. *1
    Whitney was absolutely honest when he admitted in 1812 that the whole point of using identical, interchangeable parts to make things in factories would be to render old-fashioned craftspeople obsolete—that is, “to substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for the skill of the artist.” This new way of organizing production, and using technology to replace skilled workers with cheap unskilled workers, was known at the time as the American System.
    I also told not-the-whole-truth in the last chapter when I wrote that the industrial revolution made the average citizen’s share of the economy start growing. That’s true, but is also misleading, as are many statements involving mathematical averages. *2 For the first half of the 1800s, workers in the industrializing economy didn’t actually get a fair share of the new bounty. In fact, their overall incomes probably stagnated or shrank, while the capitalists’