Cotton Gin Case Summary

“Our agricultural products have been abundant for the last few years. The crops of cotton, four-fifths of which have been raised by the

As a young kid he loved to visit his father's workshop and take apart old clocks and little machines then put them back together. As he would sometimes watch the slaves, he noticed how hard it was to get all of the seeds out of cotton. He then, in 1792 graduated from Yale College. In just a short year after he graduated, in his spare time he invented the cotton gin. In the student reading, Cotton Gin, by Maureen Romero, it explains, “The cotton gin was a very simple invention. First, the cotton bolls were put into the top of the machine. Next, you turn the handle, which turns the cotton through the wire teeth that combs out the seeds. Then the cotton is pulled out of the wire teeth and out of the cotton gin.” What may sound like just a little invention with no impact is actually a little machine with one huge impact. Since cotton was now so much easier to get rid of the seeds, everyone started planting cotton and farmers planted even more cotton. Previously, no one planted cotton, because it took so long to pick out all of the seeds. Cotton was not the cash crop. Now it only takes two seconds to get all of the seeds out. Another plus on growing cotton, is it can grow anywhere even in land where all of the nutrients are dried out of the ground. This is what made it rise to the number one cash crop.

Life before the cotton gin was very strange, unpredictable, and production of cotton was very sluggish. In the 1800s, before the cotton gin, slaves had to pick seeds out of the cotton fiber by hand. Production was so slow southerners began to give slaves breaks until the cotton gin was invented. (Cotton). “The seeds could only be removed by hand, which proved slow and inefficient, Whitney once remarked to a friend that he had never met anyone able to clean more than one pound a day.” (Elizabeth). During this time the only way was by hand, it took slaves days just to get a pound or two.

There was no money crop whatsoever; the only variety of cotton that would grow in that region was the practically useless green seed variety. Ten hours of manual work was needed to separate one point of lint from three pounds of the small tough seeds. Until some kind of machine could be built to do the work, the green seed cotton was little better than a weed.

Slavery may have helped produce abundant amounts of cotton cheaply, but it also cursed those who were tangled in the grip of this “peculiar institution”.

Before 1793 production of cotton was not very profitable due to the fact that it took an entire day to hand clean a single pound of cotton. However, with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, over 50 pounds of cotton could be cleaned a day, tuning cotton into one of the staples of the southern economy, and thus shaping social and political history in the south.

In the 1840’s, the United States began to produce approximately two-thirds of the world’s cotton. Cotton was largely grown in the south because of the better climate and soil conditions for large plantations. However, the North’s climate was much better suited for an

The cotton gin was a simple machine which de-seeded cotton. Eli Whitney created this cotton gin in 1793 when he was in Georgia. When living on a plantation in Georgia, he heard some visitors complaining about how cotton was a nice crop to have but took too long to seperate from the seeds (Patchett, 17). The visitors were told about how Eli was a good mechanic and saw some of what Eli had made. The visitors at the plantation went to Eli asking him to make something to help with this cotton problem. At first Eli was reluctant to make anything for the men because he, as he said, “had no extraordinary mechanical skills”(Patchett,18). Secondly, he said he knew nothing of cotton for he had never seen cotton or cotton seeds. Then Whitney changed his mind knowing he couldn’t resist the challenge and began a search for cotton. Once he found some cotton it only took Eli a few days to have a machine in mind (Patchett, 19).

During our negotiation with D.G. Barnhouse (DGB), we intend to utilize an integrative bargaining strategy with management. Before coming to this conclusion, we weighed the advantages and disadvantages of a distributive approach, however, we eventually decided to take an integrative and predominantly interest based stance versus a position based stance in our negotiations after assessing internal and external environmental factors. In addition, we settled on this strategy because we ultimately believe that management and the union share at the very least, one fundamental common interest, which is the firm’s financial stability. That being said, even with our plans to use integrative bargaining, we still plan to negotiate assertively to achieve

The cotton gin produced more cotton in an hour than multiple workers in a day. In 1793, Eli produced and sold the cotton gin to farmers for two-fifths of their profit. However, the farmers decided to manufacture their own version of the cotton gin. This resulted in farmers having a huge financial profit, unlike Whitney who was not so lucky. By the mid-1800s, South's cotton production had risen by a catastrophic amount from the 1700s. Before, the cotton gin the United States only produced 750,000, but after the south produced 2.85 million bales. Unlike the south, the north was not able to produce a lot of cotton because of the

The South’s first experience with exporting wasn’t a good one, in fact it was horrible. One bale of cotton was sent to England and that one bale of cotton rotted on its way across the Atlantic. At that time all of America’s cotton was grown on a total of two hundred acres on the Sea Islands just off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, however this was just the beginning. The only downside of growing cotton was the intense labor it demanded. The most tedious work with the cotton was the picking out of seeds, eventually Eli Whitney’s cotton gin would make this a much faster process and lowering the price of cotton as well. The cotton industry took off after the invention of the cotton gin, there was a much higher demand for cotton especially in

The cotton gin made it substantially easier to clean the cotton and separate the seeds from the lint. To produce one pound of clean cotton, it would take one slave all day, from the sunrise to the sunset. The cotton gin could produce one pound of cleaned cotton in one

Welcome, friends and family. We are gathered here this afternoon to pay respects to the memory of Cotton. John Cotton. I Gerald Goodenow , feel it is an obligation and honor to be here on behalf of my fellow brothers, Shecker, Teft, Lally 1 and Lally 2, to rejoice the legacy of relationships that will never disappear.

The cotton gin thus “transformed cotton as a cash crop and the American South into the globe's first agricultural

     Eli Whitney's machine was the first to clean short-staple cotton. His cotton engine was made of spiked teeth that were on a revolving cylinder which when turned by a crank, pulled the cotton fiber through small openings to separate the seeds from the lint.                                    L-ter on, the gins became horse-drawn and were powered by water. As a result, the cotton was being produced at a much faster pace. The price of cotton also decreased. Cotton soon became the number one selling good.