Invention: Cotton Gin Inventor: Eli Whitney Year of Invention: 1793 Location: Georgia
Background: Eli Whitney grew up in the state of Massachusetts; however, he left Massachusetts to become a private tutor to teach children on plantations in Georgia. Whitney soon learned the way of plantation life and noticed how long it could take to successfully cultivate (grow) cotton in the south. For many plantations, cotton was the only crop produced and the only source of income for those families. Whitney noticed that the slaves on the plantations would work for long periods of time to cultivate small amounts of cotton which in turn would not be extremely profitable for the plantation owners.
Southern plantation owners needed a way to make growing cotton a more profitable income source or they could lose their plantations for not being able to pay the taxes imposed by the federal government. As it was, the slaves and other workers on the plantations had to hand pick the cotton and then hand pick all of the cotton seeds and other debris from the cotton fibers before it could be shipped to the north to be made into clothing. With permission form Whitney's employer, Whitney began working on an invention to help speed up the production rates of cotton farming.
In 1793, Whitney was able to create an invention called the "cotton gin," (gin is short for engine). The purpose of the cotton gin was to feed the cotton fibers through a machine that could pick the cotton seeds and debris from the cotton at a faster rate than a human hand could. The cotton gin would then take the cotton fibers and flatten them into sheets that would be easier to ship to the factories in the north.
Significance: The cotton gin transformed the way cotton was cultivated for the country and soon there was a huge increase in the amount of cotton that was produced every year. The cotton gin shaped the growth of land and industry in the United States. Cotton cultivation soon swept through the nation and became known as "King Cotton!" More and more people wanted to be apart of the success in the cotton industry, farmers began to push westward to find open land where they could have a farm of their own to grow cotton.
Even though the cotton gin brought about a positive change in the cotton industry by allowing for cotton production rates to increase, there was also a dark side to the invention of the cotton gin. As the demand for cotton and the land to grow it on grew, so did the demand for cheap labor - the slave trade in America boomed and thousands of more slaves were brought to America to help meet the demand of cotton production.