Cotton Gin

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COTTON GIN

The hand labor required to prepare cotton for market served as a brake on its production and profitability. Each ball of cotton fiber had numerous seeds embedded in it, and they had to be either picked out by hand or run through a roller gin. The term "gin" arose as an abbreviation for "cotton engine." A roller gin consisted of a hand crank and two grooved rollers. A roller gin operator could turn out about five pounds of cotton fiber in a day's work—in contrast to one pound a day processed by hand—but the gin did not completely clean the cotton. It had to go through an additional process, called "bowing," to shake out dirt and debris.

The two-roller gin had been in use since its unknown early origins—possibly the twelfth century—in India and China and was imported by British colonists to North America. As cotton thread spinning was mechanized in England, planters in the southern colonies sought to increase cotton production. To that end, a Louisiana planter designed an improved roller gin in 1742, and several other men made further improvements, including treadle operation, between 1772 and 1790. The improved roller gins had higher capacities—peaking at more than one hundred pounds of fiber output a day—but also crimped the fibers.

The mechanically inclined New Englander Eli Whitney, recently graduated from Yale College, was employed as a tutor in Georgia when he turned his talent to the ongoing problem of removing seeds from cotton. Barely a year after his arrival in Georgia, Whitney in 1793 created a working model of a hand-cranked mechanical device that used a rotating, wire-toothed cylinder to remove cotton seeds. As the fibers passed through the metal teeth, the teeth caught and removed the seeds; the teeth also cleaned and combed the fibers. But the design was not without drawbacks: the wire teeth occasionally broke off and became entangled in the cotton.

American planters eagerly embraced the new cotton gin design and planted more acreage to cotton, reassigning slaves from ginning to planting and harvesting the vast new fields. As a result, cotton production in the United States expanded tremendously, more than tripling in the five years following the introduction of Whitney's design.

Although Whitney had worked in secret and then filed for a patent on his invention in 1794, the new American patent law was not yet enforceable, and he reaped little financial reward. Also, he was unable to produce enough machines to meet demand. Planters complained that Whitney charged too much and encouraged local mechanics to build copies. The early theft of Whitney's prototype from his workshop eased their way.

Once the secret of Whitney's design was out, manufacturers throughout the nation seized the opportunity to enrich themselves by producing cotton gins. Lawsuits and competing patents proliferated over the ensuing decades. Several gin manufacturers improved the design, replacing the breakable wire teeth with sections of fine-toothed saw blade, creating the so-called saw gin. Whitney himself eventually adopted saw blades in his later gins. Saw gin producers claimed daily output capacities of close to one thousand pounds of cotton fiber.

Over time, cotton spinning machinery in America and Britain was adapted to the shorter fiber lengths turned out by saw gins. In 1792, the year prior to Whitney's invention, America exported an estimated 138,000 pounds of cotton to England. In 1794 cotton exports surged to more than 1.6 million pounds. In 1826 cotton exports topped 200 million pounds.

See alsoCotton .