Why Was Whitney's Cotton Gin So Important?

In the South of the United States, cotton plantation was the major basis of the economy.  Although the Southerners owned many slaves who worked in the cotton fields all day and picked up cotton, the manual labour was still not as efficient and effective as the Whitney's cotton gin that trebled more than the amount that manual labour managed to accumulate in one day.  The effectiveness in the functioning of the gin instigated the extension of cotton plantations to increase profitability and consequently Negro slavery also became an established norm throughout the South, which was one of the main reasons for starting the American Civil War.  

Whitney's gin was named after Eli Whitney who was born in 1765 in Westboro, Massachusetts.  He realized the need for a machine that could separate cotton from its seeds.  In a few weeks, Whitney was able to build a hand-operated machine called a gin.  By the April of 1793, the machine could clean about 50 pounds of cotton fibres per day.  Consisting of a wooden cylinder that was surrounded by rows of slender spikes that were at a distance of half an inch from each other, the gin had a grid between the bars of which the distance between the spikes increased yet it was not enough to let the seeds pass through it, yet the lint managed to pass free of seeds by the revolving spikes.

Because it made the process of removing seeds from the raw cotton fiber much easier