Wall Street History

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Wall Street History

06/01/2001

The Business of America - Cotton, Part I

Last week I touched ever so briefly on the fact that cotton was far
and away America''s leading export, all the way up to the 1930s.
Well, let''s take a little more detailed look at the product, the
inventor of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney, and the period leading up
to the Civil War.

Until the end of the 18th century, the human race wore miserable
clothing. We had garments that were difficult to wash, thus
they, and we, were filthy. Cotton was different. It was easy to
clean, could be worn next to the skin, and, in warmer climes, it
was the primary garment, while in colder countries, it was still
worn next to the skin. [You see, "layered" was in long before
you probably thought it was.]

But to produce a pound of cotton thread, it took about 12-14 man
days. Compare this to other textiles at the time; six for silk, 2-5
for linen, and 1-2 for wool. It was only a matter of time before
the clever people, who make life easier for those of us who
aren''t, came up with some solutions to make cotton more viable.

In the Britain of the late 18th century, a number of inventions
were spawned. First you had the Hargreaves spinning jenny
(1764), then the Arkwright "water frame" (1769), and Samuel
Crompton''s spinning mule (1779). Arkwright''s invention was a
water-powered machine that twisted carded cotton into thread,
while the spinning mule did the work of 200 spinners. Whereas
in 1765 half a million pounds of cotton had been spun in
England, all of it by hand, by 1784 the total was 12 million, all
by machine. And in 1785 the Boulton & Watt steam engine was
introduced to power these contraptions. Some label this last
development the first Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution.

As an aside, it''s interesting to note that Britain carefully guarded
the secrets of the inventions, forbidding their export or
descriptions of them, even preventing the departure of informed
mechanics. Compare that to today and our porous borders for all
things technical.not that we could have prevented the recent
theft of secrets ranging from biotech to nuclear.

The first American cotton bale arrived in Liverpool in 1784.
[Which means the Beatles must have contemplated the name
"Cottonelles." Well?] With Eli Whitney, however, the industry
was totally transformed.

Whitney was born in 1765 on a farm in Massachusetts. The
family was poor, as was the case with most clans of the colonial
period. Back then you had to pretty much produce what you
needed in the way of crude implements, shoes, and clothing, but
it was in the little workshops where the spirit of invention often
flourished. As a boy, Eli Whitney was no exception, setting up a
forge to make nails for his father.

Whitney eventually worked his way through Yale as an engineer.
It was after graduation in 1792 that he headed on down to South
Carolina where he was taking a job as a tutor. On the way, he
decided to visit fellow grad Phineas Miller, overseer of Mulberry
Hill near Savannah, Georgia. The plantation was owned by Mrs.
Nathaniel Greene, widow of the Revolutionary War hero.

By the mid-1780s in coastal Georgia and South Carolina, a long-
fiber "Sea Island cotton" was being grown commercially that
could easily be separated from its shiny black seeds by squeezing
it through rollers. But this particular kind of cotton had little
chance of making it in the soil and climate found elsewhere in
the South. The green seed in these other regions clung to the lint
so that the rollers crushed it and spoiled the fiber. One person
could barely separate a pound by hand over the course of a day.

So with this as background, upon Eli''s arrival, Catharine Greene
noticed that he had quite an aptitude for all things mechanical
and she suggested he devise a mechanism for removing the seed
from the cotton. He solved it in 10 days. Historian Paul Johnson
relates how Whitney was able to do so.

"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."

Whitney''s invention, the "cotton gin" (''gin'' being short for
engine) was unfortunately "absurdly simple." A simple
description was all any skilled worker needed to rip it off and by
the time a patent was secured (1794), a number of copies were
already in use. [Phineas Miller was a party to the patent as well.]
Whitney ended up earning no more than $100,000, mere peanuts,
for an invention that would help change the course of history.

And the invention of the cotton gin was not a good thing for those
who would become slaves. One working on a plantation using the
gadget could produce 50 pounds of cotton a day instead of one.

But Whitney wasn''t finished. A driven, Puritan type, he was a
lifelong bachelor interested only in his job. Eli lived in a simple
farmhouse with a few workshops near New Haven, Connecticut.
He always seemed to be short of money and Congress denied his
attempt to renew his patent. [It got so bad that during the War of
1812, he directly petitioned President Madison for funds.]

In 1798 he built a firearms factory and it was during this phase
that he came up with the "American System," the theory behind
mass production. Whitney 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." [Paul Johnson] Whitney was
creating some of the first machine tools.

Interestingly, the British and French scoffed at his ideas because
it took away the craftsman''s "individuality." But labor costs
were so high it was often unfeasible to keep a craftsman on the
books. Whitney was looking for a process whereby marginally
skilled men could be easily trained, and his work pool ended up
being a largely immigrant one. It would take decades before the
superior Europeans (ahem) understood that America''s labor-
saving machinery was far better than anything they had.

Next week we''ll take a look at the growth of cotton, post-cotton
gin, and the Civil War.



Sources:

"Growth of the American Republic," Morison, Commager,
Leuchtenburg
"A Great Civil War," Russell Weigley
"A History of the American People," Paul Johnson
"America: A Narrative History," Tindall and Shi

Brian Trumbore

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