The best answer to the question: Why did Whitney consider standardized parts, would be: he wanted to achieve an increase in the mass production of guns.
Explanation:
Eli Whitney is best known for his invention, at the age of 27, of the cotton gin machine. With it he made it possible for mass production of cotton in the U.S and made U.S cotton really competitive in international markets. However, he is also known for his venture into gun-machine production in the 19th century, as the U.S considered the possibility of entering war with France. The idea of standardized parts in gun-machine production had already been proposed by a French and an English inventors, but Whitney capitalized on it, and in doing so he was able to ensure that his unskilled workers, and he himself, who had never had experience with gun production, could meet the demands of the U.S government. With the use of the idea of standardized parts, Whitney was able to accomplish this multiplication of production in guns.
During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, machines took over most of the manufacturing work from men, and factories replaced craftsmen’s workshops. The event that laid the groundwork for this monumental change was the introduction of interchangeable parts, or pre-manufactured parts that were for all practical purposes identical, into the firearms industry. Interchangeable parts, popularized in America when Eli Whitney used them to assemble muskets in the first years of the 19th century, allowed relatively unskilled workers to produce large numbers of weapons quickly and at lower cost, and made repair and replacement of parts infinitely easier.
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States.
