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This is the story of an invention that changed the world.

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Imagine a machine that could cut 10 hours of work down to one.

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A machine so efficient that it would free up people to do other things,

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kind of like the personal computer.

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But the machine I'm going to tell you about did none of this.

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In fact, it accomplished just the opposite.

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In the late 1700s, just as America was getting on its feet as a republic under the new U.S Constitution,

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slavery was a tragic American fact of life.

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George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both became President while owning slaves,

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knowing that this peculiar institution contradicted the ideals and principles for which they fought a revolution.

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But both men believed that slavery was going to die out as the 19th century dawned,

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They were, of course, tragically mistaken.

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The reason was an invention,

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a machine they probably told you about in elementary school:

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Mr. Eli Whitney's cotton gin.

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A Yale graduate, 28-year-old Whitney had come to South Carolina to work as a tutor in 1793.

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Supposedly he was told by some local planters about the difficulty of cleaning cotton.

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Separating the seeds from the cotton lint was tedious and time consuming.

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Working by hand, a slave could clean about a pound of cotton a day.

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But the Industrial Revolution was underway,

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and the demand was increasing.

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Large mills in Great Britain and New England were hungry for cotton to mass produce cloth.

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As the story was told, Whitney had a "eureka moment" and invented the gin, short for engine.

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The truth is that the cotton gin already existed for centuries in small but inefficient forms.

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In 1794, Whitney simply improved upon the existing gins and then patented his "invention":

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a small machine that employed a set of cones that could separate seeds from lint mechanically,

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as a crank was turned.

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With it, a single worker could eventually clean from 300 to one thousand pounds of cotton a day.

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In 1790, about 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in America each year.

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A bale was equal to about 500 pounds.

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By 1801, with the spread of the cotton gin,

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cotton production grew to 100 thousand bales a year.

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After the destructions of the War of 1812,

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production reached 400 thousand bales a year.

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As America was expanding through the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803,

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yearly production exploded to four million bales. Cotton was king.

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It exceeded the value of all other American products combined,

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about three fifths of America's economic output.

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But instead of reducing the need for labor, the cotton gin propelled it,

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as more slaves were needed to plant and harvest king cotton.

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The cotton gin and the demand of Northern and English factories re-charted the course of American slavery.

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In 1790, America's first official census counted nearly 700 thousand slaves.

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By 1810, two years after the slave trade was banned in America,

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the number had shot up to more than one million.

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During the next 50 years, that number exploded to nearly four million slaves in 1860,

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the eve of the Civil War.

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As for Whitney, he suffered the fate of many an inventor.

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Despite his patent, other planters easily built copies of his machine, or made improvements of their own.

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You might say his design was pirated.

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Whitney made very little money from the device that transformed America.

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But to the bigger picture, and the larger questions.

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What should we make of the cotton gin?

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History has proven that inventions can be double-edged swords.

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They often carry unintended consequences.

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The factories of the Industrial Revolution spurred innovation and an economic boom in America.

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But they also depended on child labor,

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and led to tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed more than 100 women in 1911.

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Disposable diapers made life easy for parents,

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but they killed off diaper delivery services.

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And do we want landfills overwhelmed by dirty diapers?

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And of course, Einstein's extraordinary equation opened a world of possibilities.

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But what if one of them is Hiroshima?