1793-Eli Whitney invents the Cotton Gin
By:Nathan B
The Cotton Gin is Created
The cotton gin was an invention created by Eli Whitney. Eli Whitney lived from 1765-1825. Eli pioneered in the mass production of cotton. He was born in Westboro, Massachusetts and graduated from Yale in 1792. On April 1793 he designed and constructed the cotton gin. He and his partner decided to go through Georgia and the South and install as many cotton gins as possible. Eli would charge a sort of tax; the farmers would give them 2/5ths of all the cotton that they harvested. The farmers hated this “tax” so they constructed machines out of the basic design as the cotton gin and named it different in this ripping off Eli. This was not righted until the 1800 when the patent act law was changed.
The Cotton Gin
The cotton gin was a machine created in 1793. Its job was to separate the cotton seeds from the raw cotton fibers. This was a very hard time consuming job to separate the sticky seeds from the cotton fibers by hand. For the machine it was easy, the cotton gin produced 50 pounds of cleaned cotton daily. Before the cotton gin this would have taken hundreds of hours of man labor for that much cotton.
How the Cotton Gin Affected Slavery and the later years to come
After the invention of the cotton gin raw cotton doubled after each decade after 1800. The cotton gin reduced a huge amount of slave labor of picking the seeds from the cotton. But on the other hand slave owners still needed slaves for the growing and picking of the cotton. In fact cotton growing became so profitable that the need for the land and slave labor grew immensely. In 1790 there were six slave states. But after 1860 there were 15! In 1808 southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860 approximately one in three southerners was a slave!
A picture of Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin.
Bibliography
1. Bellis, Mary.The Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney.http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/cotton_gin.htm. (8-27-07)
2. Cotton Gin.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin.(8-27-07)
3. Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin.http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h1522b.html.(8-30-07)
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