ELI WHITNEY INVENTS THE COTTON GIN

Eli Whitney had grown up in New England and didn’t know a lot about the plantations in the south. While visiting, he paid particularly close attention to cotton industry. It appeared as if cotton wasn’t very profitable. Whitney personally observed that it took too much time and effort to separate the seeds from the cotton. While one man could pick 50 pounds of cotton in one day, it will take him three weeks just to separate the seeds. Eli was smart and he figured that if he could invent a machine that would separate the seeds from the cotton much faster, then cotton could actually become a profitable business.

Eli Whitney sat down and invented a very simple machine that he called the "cotton engine." Over time it was shortened to cotton "gin." The cotton gin was a time saving and labor saving device. You would put the cotton into the cotton gin, turn the handle, and the machine would separate the seeds from the cotton instantly. Eli Whitney‘s device changed the cotton industry forever. Now instead of one man being able to produce 50 pounds of cotton in almost a month, it could be done in just a few days.

Eli Whitney filed for a patent on his device in 1793 and was officially awarded his patent for the cotton gin in 1794. But Whitney‘s plan was not to mass produce the cotton gin and sell it. Instead, he only intended on making a few cotton gins for himself. His plan was to charge farmers to process their cotton for them. His plan worked at first, until the farmers realized that they could create their own cotton gins fairly easily. The cotton gin was a very simple machine and it wasn’t hard to duplicate. Instead of making a fortune from processing other farmers cotton, Whitney spent a fortune trying to sue people for stealing his ideas.

In the end, Eli Whitney did not make very much money off of his cotton gin, but the invention of the cotton gin did change the entire economy of the south. Before the cotton gin, growing cotton was so unprofitable that many plantation owners we’re starting to free their slaves and look for other ways to make money besides farming. But after the cotton gin was invented, growing cotton became the most profitable business in the entire south. In the early 1800s, the south produced about 100 million tons of cotton per year, by the time the Civil War broke out, that number had increased to almost 2 billion per year.

THE COTTON GIN REVIVES SLAVERY

As more and more planters began to move into the newly formed states of Mississippi and Alabama in the "Deep South," The demand for slavery rose. The best place to grow cotton was in Mississippi. Planters began forming new plantations and they needed more slaves to work on these new plantations.

In 1807, the slave trade ended. This made it illegal to import slaves from other countries into the United States. This made the slaves that were already in America more valuable. The price of slaves skyrocketed and they became more valuable than ever before after the invention of the cotton gin and the outlawing of the slave trade. Instead of slavery coming to an end gradually, the slave business was now booming again. In the early 1800's, a slave sold for about $300, by the time the Civil War broke out, slaves were selling for over $6,000 each. Slaves became more valuable than the land that they worked on. The number one source of wealth in the south became slaves.

In 1798, just five years after inventing the cotton gin Eli Whitney decided to give up trying to make money off of his most famous invention to try something new. The United States Army, which was still very new at the time, needed to replace it’s all weapons from the revolutionary war. Government officials were aware of Eli Whitney's talents of inventing and manufacturing and decided to award him with a contract to produce guns for the army.

Whitney would need to create over 10,000 of the the exact same weapon. At the time, when someone manufactured something they did so by producing one at a time. When goods were made by hand, no two parts were exactly alike. All of the parts were unique to that one item. But Eli Whitney was smart and he knew that old process would take too long, he needed to find a better way.

It was at this time that he invented the idea for interchangeable parts. He decided that it would be more efficient to mass produce each piece of the gun by itself while making it compatible with all the other parts of the gun. He used a factory of workers using machines to make identical parts for the gun. He created 10,000 triggers, 10,000 barrels, etc. he would then assemble the interchangeable parts into a gun. Eli Whitney had accidentally invented a whole new way for manufacturing goods. The process was the beginning of the American system of mass production.

He was able to produce 10,000 guns for the United States Army in a fraction of the time that it would’ve taken before. He continued to invent things all the way up until he died of cancer at the age of 59 in 1825. Eli Whitney was a great inventor and is now known as the father of American technology. Factory machines made many copies of each part. That way, if one part broke, another part could easily replace it.