Eight years before
Whitney's invention, eight bales of cotton, landed at Liverpool,
were seized on the ground that so large a quantity of cotton
could not have been produced in the United States. The year
before that invention the United States exported less than one
hundred and forty thousand pounds of cotton; the year after it,
nearly half a million pounds; the next year over a million and a
half; a year later still, over six million; by 1800, nearly
eighteen million pounds a year. And by 1845 the United States was
producing producing seven-eighths of the world's cotton. Today
the United States produces six to eight billion pounds of cotton
annually, and ninety-nine per cent of this is the upland or
green-seed cotton, which is cleaned on the Whitney type of gin
and was first made commercially available by Whitney's
invention.*
* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", pp. 150-51.
More than half of this enormous crop is still exported in spite
of the great demand at home. Cotton became and has continued to
be the greatest single export of the United States. In ordinary
years its value is greater than the combined value of the three
next largest exports. It is on cotton that the United States has
depended for the payment of its trade balance to Europe.
Other momentous results followed on the invention of the cotton
gin.
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