WEBVTT 00:00:15.568 --> 00:00:18.867 This is the story of an invention that changed the world. 00:00:18.867 --> 00:00:23.418 Imagine a machine that could cut 10 hours of work down to one. 00:00:23.418 --> 00:00:27.900 A machine so efficient that it would free up people to do other things, 00:00:27.900 --> 00:00:29.968 kind of like the personal computer. 00:00:29.968 --> 00:00:33.267 But the machine I'm going to tell you about did none of this. 00:00:33.267 --> 00:00:36.883 In fact, it accomplished just the opposite. 00:00:36.883 --> 00:00:44.167 In the late 1700s, just as America was getting on its feet as a republic under the new U.S Constitution, 00:00:44.167 --> 00:00:48.568 slavery was a tragic American fact of life. 00:00:48.568 --> 00:00:53.501 George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both became President while owning slaves, 00:00:53.501 --> 00:01:01.051 knowing that this peculiar institution contradicted the ideals and principles for which they fought a revolution. 00:01:01.051 --> 00:01:06.918 But both men believed that slavery was going to die out as the 19th century dawned, 00:01:06.918 --> 00:01:10.568 They were, of course, tragically mistaken. 00:01:10.568 --> 00:01:12.819 The reason was an invention, 00:01:12.819 --> 00:01:16.421 a machine they probably told you about in elementary school: 00:01:16.421 --> 00:01:19.083 Mr. Eli Whitney's cotton gin. 00:01:19.083 --> 00:01:25.819 A Yale graduate, 28-year-old Whitney had come to South Carolina to work as a tutor in 1793. 00:01:25.819 --> 00:01:31.201 Supposedly he was told by some local planters about the difficulty of cleaning cotton. 00:01:31.201 --> 00:01:35.883 Separating the seeds from the cotton lint was tedious and time consuming. 00:01:35.883 --> 00:01:40.284 Working by hand, a slave could clean about a pound of cotton a day. 00:01:40.284 --> 00:01:42.701 But the Industrial Revolution was underway, 00:01:42.701 --> 00:01:44.801 and the demand was increasing. 00:01:44.801 --> 00:01:50.818 Large mills in Great Britain and New England were hungry for cotton to mass produce cloth. 00:01:50.818 --> 00:01:57.568 As the story was told, Whitney had a "eureka moment" and invented the gin, short for engine. 00:01:57.568 --> 00:02:04.101 The truth is that the cotton gin already existed for centuries in small but inefficient forms. 00:02:04.101 --> 00:02:11.700 In 1794, Whitney simply improved upon the existing gins and then patented his "invention": 00:02:11.700 --> 00:02:17.617 a small machine that employed a set of cones that could separate seeds from lint mechanically, 00:02:17.617 --> 00:02:19.218 as a crank was turned. 00:02:19.218 --> 00:02:26.783 With it, a single worker could eventually clean from 300 to one thousand pounds of cotton a day. 00:02:26.783 --> 00:02:33.300 In 1790, about 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in America each year. 00:02:33.300 --> 00:02:36.500 A bale was equal to about 500 pounds. 00:02:36.500 --> 00:02:39.883 By 1801, with the spread of the cotton gin, 00:02:39.883 --> 00:02:44.283 cotton production grew to 100 thousand bales a year. 00:02:44.283 --> 00:02:47.319 After the destructions of the War of 1812, 00:02:47.319 --> 00:02:51.500 production reached 400 thousand bales a year. 00:02:51.500 --> 00:02:57.050 As America was expanding through the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, 00:02:57.050 --> 00:03:03.250 yearly production exploded to four million bales. Cotton was king. 00:03:03.250 --> 00:03:07.517 It exceeded the value of all other American products combined, 00:03:07.517 --> 00:03:11.783 about three fifths of America's economic output. 00:03:11.783 --> 00:03:16.684 But instead of reducing the need for labor, the cotton gin propelled it, 00:03:16.684 --> 00:03:20.850 as more slaves were needed to plant and harvest king cotton. 00:03:20.850 --> 00:03:27.751 The cotton gin and the demand of Northern and English factories re-charted the course of American slavery. 00:03:27.751 --> 00:03:34.734 In 1790, America's first official census counted nearly 700 thousand slaves. 00:03:34.734 --> 00:03:39.633 By 1810, two years after the slave trade was banned in America, 00:03:39.633 --> 00:03:43.117 the number had shot up to more than one million. 00:03:43.117 --> 00:03:49.834 During the next 50 years, that number exploded to nearly four million slaves in 1860, 00:03:49.834 --> 00:03:53.195 the eve of the Civil War. 00:03:55.934 --> 00:03:59.800 As for Whitney, he suffered the fate of many an inventor. 00:03:59.800 --> 00:04:06.368 Despite his patent, other planters easily built copies of his machine, or made improvements of their own. 00:04:06.368 --> 00:04:08.801 You might say his design was pirated. 00:04:08.801 --> 00:04:13.884 Whitney made very little money from the device that transformed America. 00:04:13.884 --> 00:04:16.668 But to the bigger picture, and the larger questions. 00:04:16.668 --> 00:04:20.116 What should we make of the cotton gin? 00:04:20.116 --> 00:04:24.201 History has proven that inventions can be double-edged swords. 00:04:24.201 --> 00:04:27.385 They often carry unintended consequences. 00:04:27.385 --> 00:04:34.500 The factories of the Industrial Revolution spurred innovation and an economic boom in America. 00:04:34.500 --> 00:04:36.784 But they also depended on child labor, 00:04:36.784 --> 00:04:43.279 and led to tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed more than 100 women in 1911. 00:04:44.633 --> 00:04:47.833 Disposable diapers made life easy for parents, 00:04:47.833 --> 00:04:50.801 but they killed off diaper delivery services. 00:04:50.801 --> 00:04:54.667 And do we want landfills overwhelmed by dirty diapers? 00:04:54.667 --> 00:05:01.033 And of course, Einstein's extraordinary equation opened a world of possibilities. 00:05:01.033 --> 00:05:04.235 But what if one of them is Hiroshima?