Middle School

Before the cotton gin, how long would it take a skilled person to remove the seeds from one pound of cotton?

Answer :

A skilled worker could manually remove seeds from only one pound of cotton per day before the invention of the cotton gin, which then increased productivity to fifty pounds a day.

Before the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, a skilled worker could only remove the seeds from one pound of cotton per day by hand. This time-consuming process involved manually separating the seeds from the cotton fibers, which was both labor-intensive and inefficient. With the creation of the cotton gin, it became possible to remove the seeds from up to fifty pounds of cotton in a day, greatly accelerating the cotton production process and boosting the profitability of cotton as a cash crop in the South. The increase in efficiency brought by the cotton gin also contributed to the rise in cotton production from around 73,000 bales in 1800 to 730,000 bales by 1820, ultimately leading the United States to produce about 68 percent of the world's cotton by mid-century.

It could take hours and hours to finish that task. But with the invention of the cotton gin it became a much shorter task