Eli Whitney's Greatest Invention

Topics:	Eli Whitney
Words:	420
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1793 in Georgia and American inventor Eli Whitney constructed a machine that would change many lives and cotton production. The cotton gin is a machine that quickly and efficiently separates the seeds from the cotton using wire screens, small wire hooks and brushes. It worked almost like a sieve, seeds would be dropped into a cylinder made out of wood with little hooks stuck all around the interior. The tiny wire hooks would then collect the wool, then drag the cotton into wire screens/mesh with miniscule holes so that the seeds were too big to go through. The small machines would get cranked up by hand but for a large cotton gin factories would use horses. Later on steam engines were industrialised and took on this job. In 1794 Whitney received ownership for the invention and formed a cotton gin manufacturing company which he had planned to instal on plantations though many farms. This would only backfire as farmers didn’t want to share profit and made their own improved cotton gins.

Separating cotton from their seeds was hard work and took many slaves hours to make decent amounts. This was very inconvenient for a business as they were not making as much money as they could. For one slave it took ten hours to separate one pound of cotton from their seeds. With the invention of cotton gin a group of three or four slaves could crank up fifty pounds of cotton in a day. It reduced the amount of people needed to pick the cotton out of their seeds which you would think meant that they wouldn’t have to buy more slaves. Farms high profit and high demand led them to being able to hire more slaves so then they could produce more cotton. It did a reverse and brought slavery to its peak, ruining many black African lives. Slaves would be whipped and worked dry. White supremacists didn’t do anything but were making all the money, while slaves were making little to no income. This would later become a worldwide epidemic that has still ceased to scar African-Americans to this day. Although it is bitter to admit, cotton gins were cheap and accessible to farms.

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A modern day cotton gin is not much different from its original model but can work much quicker and efficiently than old cotton gins. No slaves or workers would be needed to crank the machine. It was completely independent, meaning 50 pounds a day would turn into 450000 pounds from only one machine.

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Effect of the Cotton Gin on Slavery in the United States

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Eli Whitney’s Greatest Invention. (2022, August 25). Edubirdie. Retrieved November 2, 2024, from https://edubirdie.com/examples/eli-whitneys-greatest-invention/

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