Cotton ginning

A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The fibers are then processed into various cotton goods such as linens, while any undamaged cotton is used largely for textiles like clothing. Seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil.

Handheld roller gins had been used in India and then other countries since at earliest 500 CE. The Indian worm-gear roller gin, invented some time around the sixteenth century, has, according to Lakwete, remained virtually unchanged up to the present time. A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794. Whitney's gin used a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes continuously removed the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. It revolutionized the cotton industry in the United States, but also led to the growth of slavery in the American South as the demand for cotton workers rapidly increased. The invention has thus been identified as an inadvertent contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Modern automated cotton gins use multiple powered cleaning cylinders and saws, and offer far higher productivity than their hand-powered forebears.

Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin in 1793. He began to work on this project after moving to Georgia in search of work. Given that farmers were desperately searching for a way to make cotton farming profitable, a woman named Catharine Greene provided Whitney with funding to create the first cotton gin. Whitney created two cotton gins: a small one that could be hand cranked and a large one that could be driven by a horse or water power. Thanks to the cotton gin, the amount of raw cotton yielded doubled each decade after 1800.

Single roller cotton gin: The Ajanta caves of India yield evidence of a single roller cotton gin in use by the 5th century. This cotton gin was used in India until innovations were made in form of foot powered gins. The cotton gin was invented in India as a mechanical device known as charkhi, more technically the "wooden-worm-worked roller". This mechanical device was, in some parts of India, driven by water power.

Cotton fibers are produced in the seed pods ("bolls") of the cotton plant where the fibers ("lint") in the bolls are tightly interwoven with seeds. To make the fibers usable, the seeds and fibers must first be separated, a task which had been previously performed manually, with production of cotton requiring hours of labor for the separation. Many simple seed-removing devices had been invented, but until the innovation of the cotton gin, most required significant operator attention and worked only on a small scale.

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