Which inventor in 1793 developed a cotton gin that could do the work of 50 people?

In the late 18th century, American agriculture faced a significant bottleneck. While short-staple cotton could grow in the Southern interior, the process of manually separating its sticky seeds from the fiber was incredibly slow and laborious. It could take a single person an entire day to clean just one pound of cotton, making it an unprofitable crop. This all changed when a young Yale graduate named Eli Whitney visited a Georgia plantation and witnessed the tedious process firsthand.

In 1793, Whitney designed a simple yet revolutionary machine to solve the problem. His cotton gin, short for "engine," used a cylinder with wire teeth to pull cotton fibers through a mesh screen, which was too fine for the seeds to pass through. A second rotating cylinder with brushes then cleaned the lint off the wire (Review) teeth. This invention was astonishingly effective, allowing one person to process over 50 pounds of cotton in a single day, dramatically increasing productivity.

While the cotton gin transformed the Southern economy and made the United States the world's leading cotton producer, it had a profound and tragic consequence. Rather than decreasing the need for labor, the machine made cotton cultivation so profitable that it massively increased the demand for enslaved people to plant, cultivate, and harvest the crop. This labor-saving device paradoxically became a key factor in the vast expansion and entrenchment of slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War.