In 1793, Eli Whitney introduced a new invention, the cotton gin, which led to an astonishing improvement in productivity. It used to take a farmhand one day to remove seed from one pound of cotton fiber, but with the cotton gin the same person could separate the seed from three hundred pounds of cotton fiber per day. In 1793, the United States produced 10,000 bales of cotton, just 1 percent of world production. By 1830, the country produced 732,000 bales of cotton, about half of the world’s production.13
