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takeoff_speed:continuity_of_progress:effect_of_eli_whitneys_cotton_gin_on_historic_trends_in_cotton_ginning [2022/09/21 07:37] (current) |
| ====== Effect of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin on historic trends in cotton ginning ====== |
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| // Published 07 February, 2020; last updated 26 May, 2020 // |
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| <p>We estimate that Eli Whitney’s cotton gin represented a 10 to 25 year discontinuity in pounds of cotton ginned per person per day, in 1793. Two innovations in 1747 and 1788 look like discontinuities of over a thousand years each on this metric, but these could easily stem from our ignorance of such early developments. We tentatively doubt that Whitney’s gin represented a large discontinuity in the cost per value of cotton ginned, though it may have represented a moderate one.</p> |
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| ===== Details ===== |
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| <p>This case study is part of AI Impacts’ <a href="/doku.php?id=ai_timelines:discontinuous_progress_investigation">discontinuous progress investigation</a>.</p> |
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| ==== Background ==== |
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| <p>Cotton fibers grow around cotton seeds, which they need to be separated from before use. This can be done by hand, but since 500 C.E.,<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-1-1359"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-1-1359" title="&#8220;A fifth-century Buddhist painting… constitutes the earliest evidence of a single-roller gin.&#8221; Lakwete, Angela.&nbsp;<em>Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America</em>. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003., 4."><sup>1</sup></a></span> and plausibly prehistory, a variety of tools have aided in speeding up the process. <span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-2-1359"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-2-1359" title=" &#8220;Archaeologists&#8217; oversight may explain the absence of evidence that would locate the single-roller gin in prehistory. That the rollers of extant gins are made of iron does not preclude the possibility that the machine predates the Iron Age. The roller could have been made out of stone…&#8221; <br>Lakwete, Angela.&nbsp;<em>Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America</em>. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 4."><sup>2</sup></a></span></p> |
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| <p>These tools are called ‘cotton gins’. Eli Whitney’s 1793 cotton gin was a particularly famous innovation, commonly credited with having vastly increased cotton’s profitability, fueling an otherwise diminishing demand for slave labor, and so substantially contributing to the American Civil War.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-3-1359"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-3-1359" title='Wikipedia says: &#8220;A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Whitney">Eli Whitney</a> in 1793 and patented in 1794&#8230;It revolutionized the cotton industry in the United States, but also led to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States">growth of slavery</a>&nbsp;in the&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America">American South</a>&nbsp;as the demand for cotton workers rapidly increased. The invention has thus been identified as an inadvertent contributing factor to the outbreak of the&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War">American Civil War</a>.<sup><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin#cite_note-WarCause-4">[4]</a></sup> &#8221; <br><br>“Cotton Gin.” In <em>Wikipedia</em>, June 4, 2019. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cotton_gin&amp;oldid=900249024">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cotton_gin&amp;oldid=900249024</a>. '><sup>3</sup></a></span> Variants on Whitney’s gin are known as ‘saw gins’.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-4-1359"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-4-1359" title="&#8220;In 1794 Eli Whitney patented a new ginning principle and built a new kind of gin. Instead of rollers that pinched off the fiber, he used course wire teeth that rotated through a tightly spaced metal grate to pull it from the seed…Industry ambivalence spurred others to adopt the gin but change it. Gin makers substituted an axle loaded with fine-toothed circular saws for Whitney’s wire-studded wooden cylinder. In 1796 Hogden Holmes of Augusta, Georgia, patented the adaptation, naming it the saw gin. The suit that followed capped a contentious and socially and legally mediated process from which Eli Whitney emerged as the inventor of the cotton gin.&#8221; </p> <p>Angela Lakwete, <em>Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America</em> (JHU Press, 2003), 47."><sup>4</sup></a></span> (See Figure 1.) Cotton became more valuable than all other US exports combined during the antebellum era.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-5-1359"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-5-1359" title='First table of p567, </p> <p><em><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=oNnL2qUnv1AC&amp;pg=PA567&amp;lpg=PA567&amp;dq=%22raw+cotton+has+been+one+of+the+chief+exports%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=hin_l4bNTp&amp;sig=ACfU3U2p0xXjYF0Q8FVwBpE-jbbRX41xAg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwib3NKK6u_iAhWXr54KHVt_AMkQ6AEwAXoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=%22raw%20cotton%20has%20been%20one%20of%20the%20chief%20exports%22&amp;f=false">Federal Reserve Bulletin</a></em> (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1923), <a href="https:// |