The Industrial Revolution was a revolution in the ways goods were being produced. This was the switch from hand tools to machinery, and the switch from homes to factories. The Industrial Revolution was a time when a lot of new inventions were coming out. Some of the outcomes of these inventions, like the spinning jenny and the cotton gin, helped people of that time and made their life easier. Some outcomes from these inventions were not as helpful, and caused the spread of slavery. Although the Industrial Revolution brought some hard times to America, the struggle was worth it. With the Industrial Revolution, America was modernized. We grew through this experience.
Samuel Slater was a mechanic who came to the United States from England in 1789. During that time in America, almost all goods were made by hand in the home. In England however the English mechanics had invented the spinning jenny. The spinning jenny was a machine that could spin wool or cotton fiber into thread. While in England, Samuel studied every little detail of the spinning jenny. He memorized every piece, the placement and how it worked. Then with all this information in his brain he came to America and put together an exact replica of the spinning jenny. This machine started the Revolution. By 1815, Samuel Slater had built 20 spinning mills. With the new mills cam the demand for cotton to spin into thread, therefore leading into the cotton gin.
The cotton gin was a machine that "cleaned" cotton by removing the seeds. This cleaned fifty times as much cotton in a day as a worker could by hand. Eli Whitney was the man who brought more and more cotton to Slater's spinning mills. In 1792 Whitney traveled to Georgia where he saw a plantation with slaves picking seeds out of raw cotton. Southern planters knew that because this work was so slow they could not make a profit growing cotton. So in 1793 Whitney Invented the cotton gin that did the slaves jobs for them.
