In 1790, Samuel Slater built the first American cotton- spinning machine in Rhode Island. Three years later, Eli Whitney invented the cotton ginreapertransportationsteamboatmachinesSelect your answer, a machine that removed the cotton seeds from the fibers. Soon the cotton industry in the South became very cotton ginmachinesreaperNational RoadprofitableSelect your answer, and plantation owners wanted to maintain slavery, and profitability, at all costs.

Before long machinessteamboatsteam engineNational RoadtransportationSelect your answer were rapidly changing life in the nation. Eli Whitney manufactured muskets for the U. S. Army; Francis Cabot Lowell built a factory that could complete the entire cloth-making process; a factory town was built in Lowell, Massachusetts; Cyrus McCormick improved the reaperprofitablemachinessteamboatcotton ginSelect your answer for farming; and John Deere built a steel plow that could cut through tough roots, thus making farming easier.

One of the major problems the nation faced was decent public steam enginesteamboatNational RoadtransportationErie CanalSelect your answer. Starting in the early 1800s transportation was greatly improved with the building of the National RoadmachinesreaperprofitabletransportationSelect your answer, the invention of the transportationreapersteam enginesteamboatErie CanalSelect your answer by Robert Fulton, and the construction of the Erie CanaltransportationNational Roadcotton ginsteam engineSelect your answer, which connected the port of New York with the Great Lakes.

An inventor in England built the first rail car powered by a profitablesteamboatmachinessteam enginereaperSelect your answer in 1829. Peter Cooper learned of this invention and brought it to the attention of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. By 1830, Cooper had built his own small locomotive called the machinesErie CanalTom Thumbsteam enginereaperSelect your answer.