Merrill0

With it, a single worker could eventually clean from 300 to one thousand pounds of cotton a day. In 1790, about 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in America each year. A bale was equal to about 500 pounds. By 1801, with the spread of the cotton gin, cotton production grew to 100 thousand bales a year. After the destructions of the War of 1812, production reached 400 thousand bales a year.

Working by hand, a slave could clean about a pound of cotton a day. But the Industrial Revolution was underway, and the demand was increasing. Large mills in Great Britain and New England were hungry for cotton to mass produce cloth. As the story was told, Whitney had a "eureka moment" and invented the gin, short for engine. The truth is that the cotton gin already existed for centuries in small but inefficient forms. In 1794, Whitney simply improved upon the existing gins and then patented his "invention": a small machine that employed a set of cones that could separate seeds from lint mechanically, as a crank was turned.

This is the story of an invention that changed the world. Imagine a machine that could cut 10 hours of work down to one. A machine so efficient that it would free up people to do other things, kind of like the personal computer. But the machine I'm going to tell you about did none of this. In fact, it accomplished just the opposite. In the late 1700s, just as America was getting on its feet as a republic under the new U.S Constitution, slavery was a tragic American fact of life.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both became President while owning slaves, knowing that this peculiar institution contradicted the ideals and principles for which they fought a revolution. But both men believed that slavery was going to die out as the 19th century dawned, They were, of course, tragically mistaken. The reason was an invention, a machine they probably told you about in elementary school: Mr. Eli Whitney's cotton gin. A Yale graduate, 28-year-old Whitney had come to South Carolina to work as a tutor in 1793. Supposedly he was told by some local planters about the difficulty of cleaning cotton. Separating the seeds from the cotton lint was tedious and time consuming.