The Cotton Gin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 and was patented on March 14th 1794 but not validated until 1807. Before the cotton gin, it took one man an entire day to clean only a pound of cotton. Whitney's cotton gin model was capable of cleaning 50 pounds of lint per day. The model is made up of a wooden cylinder surrounded by multiple rows of spikes that pulled the lint through the rungs of a comb-like grid. the grids were close together so that they prevented the cotton seeds from passing through. The invention of the cotton gin had a major effect on the southern United States. The South had a huge economic profit from these machines that did the job of many men and women. The supply of cotton grew larger and larger which added to the demand for textile machinery. The machinery itself was forced to improve itself by changing wooden parts to metal ones. Cotton production increased from 700,000 lbs in 1790 to 3.2 million lbs in 1850. With the large increase in cotton production, the South became even more dependent on their plantations and the slaves that worked on them. Agriculture was now becoming the main pert of the Southern economy and plantations needed more cheap labor to work the fields. the number of slaves multiplied to keep up with the crop production.
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The first large-scale mechanized American factory (also called a mill) that used a waterwheel was opened by Francis Lowell in 1814 after he founded the Boston Manufacturing Company and built a water-powered textile mill on the Merrimac River in what is now Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell's mill was the first in America to process all of the steps of textile production in the same factory
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