Informative Essay: The Invention Of The Cotton Industry
530 Words3 Pages
Have you ever noticed what your shirt is made of or what you make your bed with? Those things are made of Cotton. Cotton is a very useful resource and is a part of your everyday life. So where does cotton come from? How can the cotton plant be made into a resource that is useful? A long time ago it was a very difficult task to take cotton from field to the sheets on your bed. Then inventor Eli Whitney invented a machine called the cotton gin. The cotton gin is one of the most important inventions in U.S. history in both a positive and negative way.
Cotton has seeds inside of it which before the cotton gin you had to pick the seeds out yourself. It was a very difficult task to pick out the seeds by hand. Many farms especially in the south had slaves that worked at this slow task. It would make since that the gin would reduce the need for slaves, but in reality the opposite happened. The invention of the cotton gin actually made cotton crops more popular than ever. Southern plantations were able to process 50 pounds of cotton a day per person versus 5 pounds prior to the invention. Suddenly, cotton was the king crop of the South. The invention saved a lot of effort for workers and caused the price of things made of cotton to go down. However, it also increased the publics demand for inexpensive cotton products. So the Southern plantations actually wanted more slaves to…show more content… Cotton produced in the Southern United States and India was being shipped all over the world. Even today cotton is an industry that creates over 200,000 jobs and 25 billion dollars to the global economy. The cotton engine or gin for short, resulted in innovations that continue to make cotton accessible and useful in many products we use everyday. Did you know that cotton is even used in ice cream and potato chips. If it were not for Eli Whitney's cotton gin your favorite snacks might not be in your kitchen right