In New Haven, Eli Whitney, the “father of standardization” at the end of the eighteenth century, received a contract from Thomas Jefferson to produce 10,000 muskets.

To allow one of the first forms of mass production, Mr. Whitney divided his work into steps and put groups to work on each step, which was unprecedented from the traditional method of having each man by himself produce a part of the musket. Whitney even appeared before Congress with a pile of parts and assembled ten muskets by picking standard parts at random.

Excerpt from the Guide to the Eli Whitney Papers . . .

[Eli Whitney] was a clear-sighted business man as well as an inventor and was quick to realize the mistake he and Miller had made in attempting to monopolize the ginning business. He was so thoroughly convinced that he would never obtain any money from his invention of the cotton gin that as early as 1798 he made up his mind that he had to turn to something else. He chose the manufacture of firearms, and on January 14, 1798, obtained from the federal government a contract for "ten thousand stand of arms" to be delivered in two years. Whitney was not a gunsmith, but he proposed to manufacture guns by a new method, his aim being "to make the same parts of different guns, as the locks, for example, as much like each other as the successive impressions of a copper-plate engraving." This was perhaps the first, certainly one of the first suggestions of the system of interchangeable parts which has been of tremendous significance in industrial development.

Whitney's mechanical ingenuity and inventive capacity had been so thoroughly demonstrated, and his reputation for character was so high, that he had no difficulty in finding ten individuals in New Haven to go his bond and furnish the initial capital for the new undertaking. Purchasing a mill site just outside of New Haven, now Whitneyville, he built a factory and began the design and construction of the necessary machinery to carry out his schemes. Because of the extremely low state of the mechanic arts, his difficulties were innumerable. There were no similar establishments upon which branches of his own business might lean; there were not experienced workmen to give him any assistance; and he had to make by himself practically every machine and tool required. The expense incurred and time expended in getting the factory into operation greatly exceeded his expectations, but the confidence of his financial backers and the government seems never to have wavered. At the end of the first year after the contract was made, instead of 4,000 muskets, only 500 were delivered, and it was eight years instead of two before the contract was complete. So liberal was the government in making advances to Whitney that the final balance due him amounted to little more than $2,200 out of the original sum of $134,000. Whitney, however, had accomplished that which he had set out to do. Workmen with little or no experience could operate his machinery and with it turn out by the hundreds the various parts of a musket. Whitney had succeeded in reducing an extremely complex process to what amounted to a succession of simple operations. By his tenacity he so perfected the manufacture of arms that with the subsequent adoption of his system in the two federal armories, the government saved $25,000 annually. In 1812 he entered into a second contract with the federal government to manufacture 15,000 firearms, and contracted to make a similar quantity for the state of New York, and thereafter his unique manufactory yielded him a just reward. The business which he started employed some sixty men, and at the time the works were built he erected a row of substantial stone houses for his workmen which are said to have been the first workmen's houses erected by an employer in the United States.