Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney Free Essay Example

Overview

The Cotton Gin was a nickname for Cotton Engine. This machine was invented to be able to separate cotton fibres very quickly and easily from their seeds. These fibres could then be made into different cotton goods like linens. The cotton seeds that were separated could be replanted and used to grow more cotton.

Origins

Eli Whitney was born in Westborough Massachusetts on the eighth of December 1765. His mother who was Elizabeth Fay, died when Eli Whitney was only twelve years old.

His father was Eli Whitney senior and he was a farmer and justice of the peace. From the start Eli Whitney was very clever at mechanics. He took apart and assembled his father’s watch back together and also built himself violin. At fourteen he was running a nail forge from his father workshop. Before going to college he was farm labour and a school teacher. He started at Yale college in 1789 and he graduated from Phi Beta Kappa in 1792.

At college, he learnt a lot about science and industry.

Eli Whitney invented the mechanical Cotton Engine in 1793 and it was patented in 1794. It was fantastic for the cotton industry in the United States but it needed a lot of cotton workers to pick the cotton for the machines that there was a huge growth of slavery in the south.

Purpose

The cotton industry in the south expanded rapidly with the cotton gin. Before the gin was invented, you had to manually pick the cotton fibres from the seeds it was a intense job and would not make money the machine now meant that it was so much easier to do this job so there was more available and cheaper product.

The big downside to the Cotton Gin was the increase for slaves that were needed to pick the cotton and so slavery continued to grow.

Before the Cotton Gin the process of separating the seeds and the cotton fibres was done by hand.

Eli Whitney went to a southern plantation and saw how difficult it was to pick out the cotton seeds from the cotton. He thought he could make a machine that could pull them out and make a profit. Whitney’s cotton gin had a rotating wooden drum turned by a crank that was studded with hooks. These hooked onto the raw cotton fibres and pulled them through a small screen that was mesh. The cotton seeds were too large to go through the small slots and were designed to fall outside the gin. “Whitney liked to say that he had been inspired by watching a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence and seeing that only the feathers through came through.” (Biography of Eli Whitney, inventor of the Cotton Gin 2019).

Impacts

The Cotton Gin was vital for the growth of cloth and cotton products and this was the part of the new industrial revolution. Eli’s machine was the beginning of how today’s cotton is manufactured. Cotton Gins are still used today for manufacturing cotton. In 2019 43 million tons of cotton was produced annually in the United States. In modern manufacturing Ginning of cotton doesn’t separate the seeds from the fibres but now it dries and cleans the fibres. The process also takes out sticks and other materials and bails the cotton.

“What were the consequences of needing American slaves to pick the cotton?”

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