Economics

Economics:
The cotton gin, which was short for cotton engine, was invented in 1793 by an American inventor named Eli Whitney. The cotton gin was a machine that separated the cotton and the seeds. Before the cotton gin, it took many hours, whereas the Cotton Gin automated the process and could produce 50 pounds or more of cotton per day. This caused the price of cotton to drastically drop because of price and demand, the cotton production went way up so it was worth less because there was so much of it. People of that time thought the cotton gin's invention would lower the number of enslaved people in America, but it did exactly the opposite. The number of slaves in the United States greatly increased because they needed more cotton in order to keep up with the amount of cotton that was going through the cotton gin, because it could now process it very quickly. The cotton gin also separated the north and the south even more leading up to the civil war. The north disapproved of slavery and because of that, the south's using more slaves for operation of the cotton gin angered the north, but it was not enough to have them do something about slavery because they relied on the production of cotton for their products as well. Eli Whitney attempted to patent the cotton gin in 1794, but was mostly unsuccessful because farmers would construct the gin and pass it off as a new invention with slight changes.