Why Was The Cotton Gin Important For The Industrial Revolution?

The cotton gin made harvesting cotton much easier and far more efficient. More people were needed to man the machines than there was previously needed to pick it by hand so plantation owners in the south bought slaves from the east.  The cotton gin made it possible to harvest ten times as much than by hand so it is little surprise that cotton became Americas leading export.
As the industrial revolution raged in Britain the demand for cotton grew rapidly, gaining more money for the cotton plantations and thus making the need for more slaves in the south a necessary action. The demand for cotton grew because the textiles production was growing steadily throughout New England and Europe.Just writing an essay on the same topic :P What.A.Chore. :)
 

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.

The cotton gin helped start the civil war. It made cleaning cotton easier. For example, one person can clean a pound of cotton by pound per day but with the cotton gin a person can clean 50 pounds. Thus the cotton gin became a cash crop and southern people(s) fled westward in search of more land for cotton plantations. Since growing cotton needed a large labor force slavery increased and the civil war started...

I wrote this from the top of my head. I'm a smartypants ^-^

It made cotton more efficient and there were no more economic problems in the south

The cotton gin was important because it made picking cotton much easier.

Anytime a task that involves production of a product is mechanized it increases the output and decreases labor necessary for the task. This means more product faster, with presumably lower labor costs.

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