this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
280 points (97.6% liked)

Gaming

19919 readers
249 users here now

Sub for any gaming related content!

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not the person you initially asked, but a good one is Eli Whitney's cotton gin that made separating the cotton fiber from the seeds much easier. It had traditionally been done by hand, which is very time consuming. Whitney's invention greatly simplified the process and made cotton farming much more economically viable as an industry, ultimately leading to an extreme expansion in chattel slavery in the Southern United States and serving to solidify a planter aristocracy that would eventually seek to split with the United States in order to create its own slaveholding empire, triggering a Civil War that would decimate a large chunk of the country and kill three quarters of a million people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't exactly call a cotton gin "trivial" to build...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

I mean, this entire discussion hinges on the definition of "trivial," so...cool.