prescience and his intelligence. He realized this was something that should be told to the gun makers of America. And so he wrote a letter by hand, obviously, and had it transported across the Atlantic to the Secretary of War in Washington saying, we have two armories in America, one in Springfield in Massachusetts and one in Harpers Ferry in Virginia. Tell them that they must start making these components for our guns interchangeably. And so the War Department took a long time because of bureaucracy, but they got the message and they held a competition and they said, who wants to give us a demonstration of the making of flintlocked muskets interchangeable parts? And a man stuck up his hand and that was Eli Whitney. And Eli Whitney was famous because he invented the cotton gin, but it never patented it and so was relatively poor. He needed the money and so he knew if he successfully engineered this demonstration, he would get the contract to make 8,000 guns for the US Army, but he (39/57)
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