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eli



             The cotton gin was a device designed for the purpose of removing the seeds from raw cotton. This machine was simple in design yet extremely effective. The entire goal of the machine was to put in picked cotton and end up with seeded pure cotton. The way it worked was simple. Someone, it didn't matter who because it took no talent, took a couple of pounds of raw cotton and fed it into the top of the machine. Then, the same person would turn a crank and the cotton would be pulled through a series of combs. Since the combs were spinning in the opposite direction, the cotton could be spread apart and the seeds that were in it simply fell out into a removable tray. .
             Before the invention of this cotton gin, it took a very long time to separate the seeds from the cotton fibers by hand. Even while working extremely hard, a person (slave), could only clean, on average, a pound of cotton a day. The use of the cotton gin made it feasible to process the cotton crop much more quickly and much more economically. After the invention, one person could clean the seeds from fifty pounds of cotton in one day. The plantation owners had a big enough work force to quickly harvest the newly grown cotton but since there was no easy way to clean it, So the cotton gin was important because it made cotton a profitable crop. Just as carding, spinning, and weaving machines made it profitable to produce large amounts of cloth in factories, the cotton gin made it possible to grow large amounts of cotton on big farms called plantations. The northern factories were ready to accept as much raw cotton as the southern growers could ship them.
             The work involved in growing cotton was hot and difficult. In the South, African slaves did most of this work. It is generally accepted that the gin's ability to quickly remove seeds from cotton, together with the difficulty of mechanizing the planting, cultivating, and picking of cotton, helped to fasten slavery on the South.


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