Modularity History: Eli Whitney

History has considered Eli Whitney to have been a mechanical genius. As the inventor of a better Cotton Gin or Cotton Engine, a much more efficient and productive machine than those in use in the early 1790s, he further established himself in the way that history records. In some ways he is the father of a revolution in industry, and could even be linked to a model of computing in the Twentieth Century, or to any construction of advanced machines.

He developed his skills in childhood, and as one would expect he continued to innovate in adulthood. After the engine, he made his most important contribution with the manufacturing principle of uniformity. It is true that in France in the 1780s Le blanc had developed a manufacturing scheme that used interchangeable parts for rifles: the barrel, the bayonet etc. Whitney developed the concept of uniformity of parts while working independently of Le blanc, also in the production of rifles or muskets.

At least at first, he only used the concept of interchangeable parts with the locks for the rifles. A wonderful image that Greene paints in his tracing of the events of Whitney’s work, is the dumping of several sets of parts of rifle locks before government officials in order for Whitney to win monetary support for his methods. The officials might put the weapons together based upon part types that were specifically not tailored for any one rifle, but were interchangeable.

His methods were to standardize parts through building machines that removed the necessity of skilled artistry in commodity or rifle production. His machine tools later led to the invention of precision chiseling devices that could systematically and precisely engineer interchangeable components and they also led to the development of precision lathes.

While standardized parts and machines to build machines led to a type of technological and productive efficiency, in some respects Whitney’s work did not have time to develop into a refined system that would have allowed one mathematician, Charles Babbage, to bring us to the computer age in the 19th Century. The logic of contemporary computing, that of reusability and modularity, was not possible even given Whitney’s system, as Babbage’s engine could not be built until 1998, about 170 years later.

Although not early enough for working computers, Whitney’s achievement helped to convince government officials and business owners that machine tools, no need for skilled labor, and uniformity of parts could facilitate production of other machines, tools, and commodities. This affected production greatly in subsequent periods of manufacturing. In some sense we still have interchangeable parts in the information revolution.

The Cocoa development environment on the Apple Macintosh, is an extremely sophisticated system of reusable and modular components that can be put together with less rewriting or coding of tasks. Cocoa was developed on Next machines before being ported to the apple OS X development environment. It allows completely customizable widgets and operating system tools and components through less programming, almost making the construction of software mechanical like a set of parts to be put together by government officials as in Whitney’s days.

One notes that the arguments against reusability and modularity in computers stem from the passing of the industrial age that Whitney helped to launch, and the consideration of possibly new needs for the digital age. Yet, in the late 20th century, the Frankensteinian transplant of a human hand onto a patient who had lost his natural hand in an industrial accident, suggest two things. Not only can industrial processes maim humans in an act that strives to make them like machines with reusable parts, the operation grafting and transplanting the human hand onto a body shows that we are in fact made of reusable parts. If in humans, than why not in computers?

Another interesting aspect from Whitney is that in order to switch to a different commodity, he would have to have his machines undergo a process of "retooling": he would have to convert the machines that make the then current commodity so that they could manufacture the parts for the new commodity, with precision. Each precision part needs an elaborate machine to precisely manufacture it, and each machine had to be rebuilt to change the part let alone the product. In some sense software continually has to be updated as technological interfaces change.

When the web was young, web pages primarily used HTML. With the growth of the Internet, we see the use of XML and other languages, both programming and scripting, on the Internet. Software must be retooled to allow the production of content in terms of current web technologies. With these metaphors, it is easy to reflect on the similarities or industrial and information ages, the difference being that the industrial is made from all different compounds found in the world; the information, from metals and cable that encode and transport signals and data. Both are representations of modularity and reuse.

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