How inventions change history (for better and for worse) - Kenneth C. Davis — Transcript

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1. 0:00Transcriber: Tom Carter Reviewer: Bedirhan Cinar
2. 0:15This is the story of an invention that changed the world.
3. 0:18Imagine a machine that could cut 10 hours of work down to one.
4. 0:23A machine so efficient that it would free up people to do other things,
5. 0:27kind of like the personal computer.
6. 0:29But the machine I'm going to tell you about did none of this.
7. 0:33In fact, it accomplished just the opposite.
8. 0:36In the late 1700s, just as America was getting on its feet as a republic under the new U.S Constitution,
9. 0:44slavery was a tragic American fact of life.
10. 0:48George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both became President while owning slaves,
11. 0:53knowing that this peculiar institution contradicted the ideals and principles for which they fought a revolution.
12. 1:01But both men believed that slavery was going to die out as the 19th century dawned,
13. 1:06They were, of course, tragically mistaken.
14. 1:10The reason was an invention,
15. 1:12a machine they probably told you about in elementary school:
16. 1:16Mr. Eli Whitney's cotton gin.
17. 1:19A Yale graduate, 28-year-old Whitney had come to South Carolina to work as a tutor in 1793.
18. 1:25Supposedly he was told by some local planters about the difficulty of cleaning cotton.
19. 1:31Separating the seeds from the cotton lint was tedious and time consuming.
20. 1:35Working by hand, a slave could clean about a pound of cotton a day.
21. 1:40But the Industrial Revolution was underway,
22. 1:42and the demand was increasing.
23. 1:44Large mills in Great Britain and New England were hungry for cotton to mass produce cloth.
24. 1:50As the story was told, Whitney had a "eureka moment" and invented the gin, short for engine.
25. 1:57The truth is that the cotton gin already existed for centuries in small but inefficient forms.
26. 2:04In 1794, Whitney simply improved upon the existing gins and then patented his "invention":
27. 2:11a small machine that employed a set of cones that could separate seeds from lint mechanically,
28. 2:17as a crank was turned.
29. 2:19With it, a single worker could eventually clean from 300 to one thousand pounds of cotton a day.
30. 2:26In 1790, about 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in America each year.
31. 2:33A bale was equal to about 500 pounds.
32. 2:36By 1801, with the spread of the cotton gin,
33. 2:39cotton production grew to 100 thousand bales a year.
34. 2:44After the destructions of the War of 1812,
35. 2:47production reached 400 thousand bales a year.
36. 2:51As America was expanding through the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803,
37. 2:57yearly production exploded to four million bales. Cotton was king.
38. 3:03It exceeded the value of all other American products combined,
39. 3:07about three fifths of America's economic output.
40. 3:11But instead of reducing the need for labor, the cotton gin propelled it,
41. 3:16as more slaves were needed to plant and harvest king cotton.
42. 3:20The cotton gin and the demand of Northern and English factories re-charted the course of American slavery.
43. 3:27In 1790, America's first official census counted nearly 700 thousand slaves.
44. 3:34By 1810, two years after the slave trade was banned in America,
45. 3:39the number had shot up to more than one million.
46. 3:43During the next 50 years, that number exploded to nearly four million slaves in 1860,
47. 3:49the eve of the Civil War.
48. 3:55As for Whitney, he suffered the fate of many an inventor.
49. 3:59Despite his patent, other planters easily built copies of his machine, or made improvements of their own.
50. 4:06You might say his design was pirated.
51. 4:08Whitney made very little money from the device that transformed America.
52. 4:13But to the bigger picture, and the larger questions.
53. 4:16What should we make of the cotton gin?
54. 4:20History has proven that inventions can be double-edged swords.
55. 4:24They often carry unintended consequences.
56. 4:27The factories of the Industrial Revolution spurred innovation and an economic boom in America.
57. 4:34But they also depended on child labor,
58. 4:36and led to tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed more than 100 women in 1911.
59. 4:44Disposable diapers made life easy for parents,
60. 4:47but they killed off diaper delivery services.
61. 4:50And do we want landfills overwhelmed by dirty diapers?
62. 4:54And of course, Einstein's extraordinary equation opened a world of possibilities.
63. 5:01But what if one of them is Hiroshima?