Whitney combined in a singular degree high inventive capacity with clear judgment and steady determination. By 1798 he saw that his hopes for any large return from the cotton gin were uncertain. He turned to the manufacture of firearms and by steady, sure steps built up another business and died a well-to-do man. In this second enterprise he developed the interchangeable system of manufacture and thereby influenced modern society almost as greatly as he had in the invention of the cotton gin, although this is little realized by the general public. In the chapter on “The Rise of Interchangeable Manufacture” we traced Whitney’s work as a gun manufacturer from 1798, when he first applied for his contract for ten thousand muskets. His undertaking of this contract required courage and self-confidence. Although he was not a trained gun maker, he proposed “from the start” to manufacture guns by a new method, which was ridiculed by those familiar with the manufacture of firearms at that time. He had to build a plant, design and equip it with new and untried types of tools; and to educate workmen to his methods. Furthermore, he did this work, involving $134,000, under bond for satisfactory performance. The high estimation in which Whitney was held by those who knew him is evidenced by the fact that, although he was already embarrassed and embarking on an entirely new kind of enterprise, ten of the foremost men of New Haven signed his bond for the faithful performance of his contract. A contemporary, intimately acquainted with his work, has outlined his method of manufacture in words which describe the interchangeable system, as it exists today, so accurately that we give it in full: The several parts of the muskets were, under this system, carried along through the various processes of manufacture, in lots of some hundreds or thousands of each. In their various stages of progress, they were made to undergo successive operations by machinery, which not only vastly abridged the labor, but at the same time so fixed and determined their form and dimensions, as to make comparatively little skill necessary in the manual operations. Such were the construction and arrangement of this machinery, that it could be worked by persons of little or no experience, and yet it performed the work with so much precision, that when, in the later stages of the process, the several parts of the musket came to be put together, they were as readily adapted to each other, as if each had been made for its respective fellow.... It will be readily seen that under such an arrangement any person of ordinary capacity would soon acquire sufficient dexterity to perform a branch of the work. Indeed, so easy did Mr. Whitney find it to instruct new and inexperienced workmen, that he uniformly preferred to do so, rather than to attempt to combat the prejudices of those who had learned the business under a different system.[179]