I've changed the world!

Have you ever experienced being inspired by someone or something, Chumley?

Yep, for better or worse. But hardly all of the those that fall into one or two of the (presumably) different categories above would be inspirational enough to have the effects I refer to. In fact I could likely easily argue that the vast majority of these movers and shakers over the last 5,000 years are unknown to both you and me.

BTW my cats are fighting under the bed!

Re: I've changed the world!


The latter.

Like Paris Hilton





you learned your lesson?

they "took advantage of the circumstances they found themselves in" to "changed the world". you need to do one to achieve the other, its like saying i either drove the car or put my keys in the ignition.

Re: I've changed the world!

Yep.

The latter may be necessary for the former, but the former is not necessary for the latter. One can take advantage of one's circumstances (I imagine all of us do it every day) without necessarily changing the world.

you can also use the latter to not change the world aka al gore

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin--about 1793, i believe, but it could easily be tracked-down.

At that time, cotton was not a big crop in the United States. The process of "carding" cotton (using a heavy brush, the bristles of which were metal and more like the tines of a comb) was a slow process, and that made the production of cotton labor-intensive. So, cotton was produced in small quantities for the domestic market, and was not seen as a major cash crop.

At that time, slavery rested on the monoculture of tobacco. Tobacco badly exhausts the soil, and American planters were just about at market saturation--meaning they already produced about all of the tobacco they could hope to sell to Europe. Therefore, slavery could be seen in the last decade of the 18th century as approaching the long slope of decline. With American tobacco production near saturation, there was little impetus to clear large tracts of new land, and therefore, small holders, new settlers on the edge of civilization, were those most likely to take up tobacco cultivation, and there was little reason for slavery to spread or to increase.

But Whitney's cotton gin changed all of that. Previously, one slave would pick enough cotton in a day to keep two or three slaves occupied for a day in carding the cotton to remove the seeds. But with a cotton gin, one slave could "card" the cotton picked by two or three slaves. Additionally, as a growing crop, cotton is far less labor intensive than tobacco. Suddenly, new economic opportunities opened up to slave owners. With the cotton gin, a profitable monoculture in cotton was possible, it was worth their while to abandon the saturated tobacco market and switch to cotton.

There was no real cotton cloth industry in Europe. Most of the cotton cloth came from India (Calicut being one of the ports from which it was shipped, it was often referred to as calico). It was simply not worth anyone's time to set up a textile industry in cotton, because it would take many, many shiploads of raw cotton, coming from many, many thousands of miles away to make one shipload of cotton cloth. But if American planters produced large amounts of cotton, it suddenly became more feasible.

Added to that, American planters in the South had long been accustomed to shipping tobacco to factors (agents) in England, and after the Revolution, in Holland and France. Those factors would sell the product, and then buy finished and luxury goods to ship back--often, no money changed hands, and the European factors cheated the Americans shamelessly (c.f., Washington's abandonment of tobacco to get out from under the burden of constant debt), and cotton now became not only a feasible import product, but a potentially wildly profitable commodity. England had long had an export industry in fine woolen cloth, and now there was a prospect to do the same with cotton. This coincided with the creation of steam-powered textile mills, which offered opportunities for greater economies of scale, and therefore greater profits.

Not long after Whitney invented the cotton gin, we fought the War of 1812, during which Andrew Jackson fought and won the Creek War against American Indians who had been supplied by the English and encouraged to attack the American settlements. With the successful conclusion of the Creek War in 1813, and the end of the war of 1812, Alabama and Mississippi were opened up for settlement. Cotton exhausted the soil just as tobacco did, but in the "Old South," it had not yet done so after planters switched from tobacco, and in the newly opened territories, there was wide scope for clearing new land, which was very cheap, and starting up a slave-driven enterprise in growing cotton.

England began a large and rapidly growing cotton-based textile industry. France began such a textile industry of its own. By the time the American Civil War began almost 50 years later, the textile industries in England and France were their biggest industrial operations. In the United States, the cotton-growing monoculture was the biggest agricultural industry, and the worst abuses of slavery occurred as a result--King Cotton held out the lure of getting rich quick, and especially for those who didn't care how they abused the land and the slaves.

Whitney invented his cotton gin not because anyone was calling for such a device, but rather, simply because he had traveled in the American South and had seen and pondered the problem of producing cotton for weaving mills. He was a mechanical inventor, and if it had not been for the cotton gin, he would have been remembered, if he were remembered at all, for designing a musket with interchangeable parts, which meant that a lot of relatively unskilled labor could produce the parts, allowing a skilled gunsmith to make muskets by hand much more rapidly. Whitney was a very clever inventor of mechanical systems.

No one was looking for a machine to solve the "cotton problem," and indeed, why would they? There was no large cotton industry outside India, and the English were still focused on their profitable woolen industry. The French had not even yet thought of setting up a textile industry.

This is a case in which one man changed the course of human events, and changed it drastically, but without necessarily taking advantage of existing circumstances. The large textile industry in cotton cloth only arose because of Whitney's cotton gin--no one was going around saying: "If some brilliant inventor would devise a quick and cheap way to card cotton, we'd be able to put all these idle cotton mills to work."

There is a very great deal of historically significant events which are the product of a concurrence of events, but which were entirely unforeseen and unpredictable, because they only occurred after one man decided to do something which no one had thought of before, and for which neither people nor circumstance were prepared.

By the way, for those who might have missed the point--the significance of the cotton gin is not the creation (actually dramatic expansion of) the textile industry in Europe--the significance of the cotton gin lies in the the institution of slavery in the American South. The cotton gin "saved" a dying agricultural production method (the reliance on slave labor), and made possible a rapid and dramatic exploitation of new lands (Alabama and Mississippi) as "slave states." This had a profound effect on the politics of the United States, including but not limited to the Missouri Compromise, the Mexican War, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the American Civil War--and by extension, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century.

Setanta,

1. Another consequence of the cotton gin would have been the freeing up of land in India for food crops. A landlord (British in most cases) would naturally put his land to the most profitable use. If cottons price was forced down by a sudden increase in the supply due to American horticulture switching to cotton which now became profitable then the Indian landlord would be forced to grow a crop that would sell. If he chose a food crop then the price of food in India would drop. I suspect that this has a something to do with the relatively recent absence of famine in India. Suddenly the poorer classes of people could find jobs (growing vegetables on former cotton ground) and afford to eat.

A fine example of the law of unintended consequences

Re: I've changed the world!

All people have changed the world,
in varying degrees,
by taking advantage of the circumstances
in which they found themselves.

The world changed forever with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. Ferdinand became heir tho Franz Joseph's Austrian throne after his older brother (Rudolf) committed suicide, and his father died. Ferdinand wasn't one of Franz Joseph's favorites. Sophie didn't meet the old Emperor's exacting breeding requirements, but the people loved her and regarded the marriage sort of like Charley and Diana. Ferdinand was also far too liberal in his politics to suit Franz Joseph, who was nearing the end of his life. The world largely expected that the Archduke would grant autonomy to the southern regions of the Empire.

The Black Hand organization were sworn to the death to work for the creation of a separate Bosnian State, and had already assassinated, or attempted assassinations on several Austrian notables. Things were tense when the Archduke and his wife arrived to inspect the army. A failed bomb attempt earlier in the day almost resulted in canceling a motorcade, at least for the Duchess Sophie. She insisted on staying with her husband and was later shot to death in his motorcar.

Ferdinand and Sophie never chose to be VIPs, and if Ferdinand had come to the throne the political situation in the region might even have improved as he intended. The Archduke certainly never dreamed that his death would set off a series of great wars that lasted through much of the 20th century. The relative peace resulting from the Congress of Vienna ended with the Archduke's death. The Old Order throughout Europe was shaken and tumbled. Hoary old military traditions and doctrines were machine-gunned by modern war. European colonization became "Dead Men Walking". The trenches were filled with blood and gore that decimated European populations. Lenin was smuggled into Russia, and the Bolsheviks set up shop for 75 years.

The Great War failed to bring peace as the forces unleashed by Ferdinand's death segued in to WWII, and a long Cold War studded with little "wars" on the periphery of the Great Powers. As the 21st century commences, we are still dealing with the fallout from the assassination of the Archduke and his lovely wife. They changed the world unwittingly, and totally unaware of how their little deaths would unleash the deaths of millions over the coming years. Poor Ferdinand. Poor Sophie.