The Invention Of Eli Whitney's Revolutionary Machine

Eli Whitney was born on December 8th, 1765 in Westbro Massachusetts. He grew up on a farm but had a great interest in designing and building machines. He realized early in life that he had a talent for this and during his youth he invented many things. One invention was a nail forge. Whitney went to Yale University and graduated in 1792. He became a lawyer.While on his way to a job opportunity he met Catherine Green on her Mulberry Grove plantation which is close to Savannah, Georgia. The plantation was one that grew cotton. Cotton was a major crop produced in the south and was easy to grow and store. Cotton, while easy to grow and store, was very difficult to harvest. In order to have a usable product plantation owners had to separate the cotton seeds from the fibers by hand. This took a lot of time and energy to produce a small amount of cotton. While he stayed at the plantation he realized how difficult it was to make a living growing cotton and thought about what he could do to help make things easier. …show more content…
It was called the cotton gin. He invented this machine in 1794. The cotton gin was a machine which cotton is ran through that strains the cotton seed from the cotton fibers. This new machine, the cotton gin, changed the way that farmers looked at growing cotton. Now farmers no longer had to remove the seed from the cotton by hand anymore. The cotton gin allowed farmers to grow more cotton because the process of removing the seed from the fiber is now a lot quicker. Once the cotton gin was widely used, the amount of cotton produced increased by two every ten years. Due to the cotton gin, the amount of slavery in the South