This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

When Apple founder Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone to the public in 2007, he used multiple iPhones.

If one crashed or had another issue, he secretly swapped it for another one.

But way back in 1801, another young inventor named Eli Whitney, already known for his invention

of the cotton gin in 1794, seized an opportunity to try to make his fortune.

Whitney claimed to have invented interchangeable parts for muskets.

He unveiled this invention with a jobs-like presentation before a group of men,

which included the outgoing president John Adams and the recently elected Thomas Jefferson.

Here to tell the story is our regular contributor, Ashley Lubinsky.

When you're in school, you learn about a lot of different historic figures throughout American culture. You learn about people like Henry Ford and his assembly line, and you hear about

Eli Whitney and his cotton gin. And these histories are really wrapped up in a nice little bow.

But when you get older and possibly study history, you learn that things aren't always as simple as you learned in school and aren't always as true as you learned in school.

And one part of those narratives that's often left out

is the fact that these people were inspired by firearms.

For example, Henry Ford visited Winchester

right before he built his Highland Park factory in Detroit,

and it was the processes used in Winchester factories and as well as cult factories

that inspired him to build his assembly line, which we now associate 100% with him and not

with anybody else.

And then the other person that has kind of this neat, compact history is Eli Whitney and his cotton gin.

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