His contract of 1798 resulted. From the very start Whitney proposed to manufacture these arms on a “new principle.” He built a mill at Whitneyville, just outside of the city of New Haven, utilizing a small water power. Nearly two years were required to get the plant into operation, as he had to design and build all of his proposed machinery. In 1812 when making application for another contract for 15,000 muskets, Whitney writes: The subscriber begs leave further to remark that he has for the last 12 years been engaged in manufacturing muskets; that he now has the most respectable private establishment in the United States for carrying on this important branch of business. That this establishment was commenced and has been carried on upon a plan which is unknown in Europe, and the great leading object of which is to substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience; a species of skill which is not possessed in this country to any considerable extent.[153] [153] _Ibid._, p. 122. In another place it is stated that the object at which he aimed and which he accomplished was “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.”[154] [154] Denison Olmstead: “Memoir of Eli Whitney,” p. 50. 1846. Mr. Whitney’s determination to introduce this system of manufacturing was ridiculed and laughed at by the French and English ordnance officers to whom he explained it. They said that by his system every arm would be a model and that arms so made would cost enormously. Even the Washington officials were skeptical and became uneasy at advancing so much money without a single gun having been completed, and Whitney went to Washington, taking with him ten pieces of each part of a musket. He exhibited these to the Secretary of War and the army officers interested, as a succession of piles of different parts. Selecting indiscriminately from each of the piles, he put together ten muskets, an achievement which was looked on with amazement. We have not the exact date of this occurrence, but it was probably about 1800.[155] [155] Blake: “History of Hamden, Conn.,” p. 138. Meantime Simeon North, who unlike Whitney was a gun maker by trade, had completed his first contract for 1500 pistols, and had executed a number of others. In these no mention was made of interchangeability, but whether independently or not, he very soon began to develop the same methods as Whitney. In a letter to the Secretary of the Navy in 1808, North says: I find that by confining a workman to one particular limb of the pistol untill he has made two thousand, I save at least one quarter of his labour, to what I should provided I finish^{d} them by small quantities; and the work will be as much better as it is quicker made.[156]