Cotton Gin

In the reading it briefly mentioned the Cotton Gin as one of the major inventions of the industrial revolution.

Before the invention of the cotton gin, cotton farming was a very tedious job requiring lots of man power. After picking the cotton, hundreds of workers had to separate the seeds from the cotton and make sure that the cotton was completely "clean" of seeds before it could be traded and sold. This process took hours and small amounts of cotton were produced per day. Cotton therefor wasn't a valuable crop because of the amount of effort needed to produce it, and the small produced. Then the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793. It was a machine that would separate the seeds from the cotton for the people. Now, instead of producing a few pounds of clean cotton per day, the cotton gin could produce fifty pounds. The value of cotton sky rocketed. It went from a nearly valueless crop, to one of the cash crops of the U.S. It even began to compete with tobacco at one point. The invention also made it so that many less people were needed, along with less labor, but the output of the crop was much higher. The people who didn't have to clean the cotton any more headed to cities and factories. This is why the cotton gin was such a huge invention, and played such a huge part in the Industrial Revolution and development of the United States.