Why Is The Cotton Gin Important

The Industrial Revolution in the United States occurred after witnessing it take place in England. The cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney, was perhaps the invention that bore the most importance of the time period and had the greatest impact on United States society. Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. In an attempt to earn money so that he could pay off student debts from Yale University, he employed himself as a tutor in Georgia. While spending time in the state, Whitney became aware that farmers faced obstacles when it came to extracting the cotton from the seed itself. The process of doing this by hand was time consuming and resulted in relatively miniscule crop yield. Also, separating the seeds from the bolls with bare hands often times left
The cotton is then pushed through a part that acts as a filter by allowing the bolls to pass through, but not the seeds. Finally, there is a set of brushes that rotate as the teeth do that clean and remove the cotton from the wires and sends it out of an exit slot. The cotton that leaves the gin is the final result of the production process. This new and fast way to pick and separate cotton increased productivity and was able to pick more cotton at once, versus the traditional way of hand picking it. The South relied on the production of several major cash crops. One of these crops was cotton. When the cotton gin was invented and made its way to slaveholders with large plantations, the amount of cotton produced rose tremendously. Normally, a single slave could only pick one pound of cotton in a day. The cotton gin increased this amount to fifty pounds while still working the same amount of time. By 1840, over one million pounds of cotton was produced, outnumbering the 1,500 pounds produced in 1790. Then, by 1860, Southern cotton made up two-thirds of the United States’ exports. The success of cotton production in the South led to the region being dubbed “King