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A Tarred Cloth

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A Tarred Cloth
William Johnson
Professor Adams
HST 318- 30653
9 April 2017
Engineering and Industrialization:
A Tarred Cloth

Technological progress throughout the ages has had a wide range of consequences, large and small, radical and subtle, positive and negative. The Industrial Revolution, a time where many business practices, new innovations, and products had little to no regulation, and where technology was progressing quickly- many inventions that had been made with only the best intentions, had unforeseen effects. One such invention was the cotton gin, which had inadvertently caused a large spike in the demand for slaves, and had indirectly contributed to the start of the civil war. Another technology, the factory system saw a great increase in the …show more content…
The device separated the usable cotton fibers from sticky seeds in the difficult to process short-staple cotton, which was commonly used throughout the southern states for its ease of growth compared to long-staple cotton, which was easy to process, but could only grow along coastal land. It used a toothed wheel to pull these cotton fibers through a mesh, which prevented seeds from coming through, and was capable of processing around 18 to 25 times the amount of cotton per day, per work hand; while it took a single slave around 10 hours to process a single pound of cotton by hand, 2 or 3 slaves could use the gin to produce 50 pounds of processed cotton a day (Bomboy). After this invention, output of cotton soared, and production of cotton by states below the Mason-Dixon Line grew from 720,000 to 2.85 million bales from 1830 to 1850 (Pierson). As demand for cotton grew, and farming cotton became profitable due to the invention of the cotton gin, the demand for slaves grew, causing the slave population in the southern United States to swell to 4 million after the gin became widely spread (Bomboy). With Congress outlawing importation of slaves in 1808, tensions rose over the next 40 years until the start of the civil war (Golden Ink). While slavery and the reasons for the start of the civil war were already present, the invention of the cotton gin caused these situations to only worsen, as unforeseen consequences of an otherwise successful
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