Before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, a worker could clean about 450 grams of cotton per day manually. With the cotton gin, that same worker could process 23 kilograms—a 50x productivity boost. Similarly, Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, introduced in 1831, revolutionized farming by allowing a single person to harvest up to 12 acres of grain in a day, compared to the half-acre possible with traditional methods—a 24x increase. And then, in 1913, Henry Ford’s assembly line delivered an 8x improvement in automobile production, reducing the time to assemble a car from 12 hours to just 90 minutes.
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