A History of the American People

cost of cotton yarn had fallen by go percent. Then came a second wave of mechanical
innovation. By the early 1860s the price of cotton cloth, in terms of gold bullion, was less than 1
percent of what it had been in 1784, when the industry was already mechanized. There is no
instance in world history of the price of a product in potentially universal demand coming down
so fast. As a result, hundreds of millions of people, all over the world, were able to dress
comfortably and cleanly at last.
But there was a price to be paid, and the black slaves paid it. The new British cotton industry
was ravenous for raw cotton. As the demand grew, the American South first began to grow
cotton for export in the 1780s. The first American cotton bale arrived in Liverpool in 1784.
Then, abruptly, at the turn of the century, American exports were transformed by the widespread
introduction of the cotton gin. This was the invention of Eli Whitney (1765-1825). His was a
case, common at this time, of a natural mechanical genius. He came from a poor farm in
Massachusetts and discovered his talent by working on primitive agricultural machinery. Then
he worked his way through Yale as an engineer. In 1793, while on holiday at Mulberry Grove,
Savannah, the plantation of Mrs Nathaniel Green, he became fascinated by the supposedly
intractable problem of separating the cotton lint from the seeds-the factor which made raw cotton
costly to process. Watching a cat claw a chicken and end up with clawfuls of mere feathers, he
produced a solid wooden cylinder with headless nails and a grid to keep out the seeds, while the
lint was pulled through by spikes, a revolving brush cleaning them. The supreme virtue of this
simple but brilliant idea was that the machine was so cheap to make and easy to operate. A slave
on a plantation, using a gin, could produce 50 pounds of cotton a day instead of one. Whitney
patented his invention in 1794 but it was instantly pirated and brought him in eventually no more
than $100,000-not much for one of history's greatest gadgets. But by 1800-10 his gins had made
the United States the chief supplier of cotton to the British manufacturing industry's rapidly
rising demand. In 1810 Britain was consuming 79 million pounds of raw cotton, of which 48
percent came from the American South. Twenty years later, imports were 248 million, 70
percent coming from the South. In 1860 the total was over 1,000 million pounds, 92 percent
from Southern plantations. During the same period, the cost (in Liverpool landing prices) fell
from 45 cents a pound to as low as 28 cents.
It testifies to the extraordinary fertility of American genius that the country could produce two
such men as Whitney and Fulton in one generation. It is a matter of fine judgment who was the
more creative. Whitney is often associated solely with the cotton gin. That is a grave injustice to
his genius. Indeed he is a fascinating example of the complex impact one man can have on
history. Whitney was a dour, single-minded Puritan type, a lifelong bachelor interested only in
his job, a secular hermit, driven by the Calvinist work-ethic. He lived simply in a farmhouse and
his factory' was never more than a series of crude workshops, a cottage industry, at Mill Rock, New Haven. But he had many assistants and apprentices, some of whom did not like working as hard as he did, until they dropped asleep on the floor. They ran away and he had to chase them to get them back. He built a firearms factory in 1798 but was always short of capital. Congress denied his petition to get his gin patent renewed and, during the war of 1812, he had to go direct to President Madison for money. America had no proper capital market at this time. Whitney thought not merely in terms of single new ideas but of whole processes. He grasped that the way to produce machinery or products in vast quantities at low prices was to achieve interchangeability of parts, uniformity, standardization, on a scale never before imagined. He called this theAmerican System.' His firearms factory was the first realization of it.