San Antonio College Library

A series of specific challenges led Eli Whitney to exercise his ingenuity in technology and made him an engineer. His cotton gin revolutionized Southern agriculture. And the problems of manufacturing large quantities of guns drove him to develop principles important in his own time, and even more important later. The application of those principles would one day give American industry the structure within which it more than fulfilled the ambitions...

In this video, we'll explain the story of the infamous, cotton gin - an 18th century invention used by African-American slaves that changed the United States for the better and the worse.