Georgia Cotton Kingdom

The Cotton Gin

The first cotton gin was patented by Eli Whitney on March 14, 1794 and was a table-top machine. There is debate as to where Eli got the idea and if it were even his own idea. One theory says he got the idea from slaves, which is the most viable theory as they were already using a similar machine to the cotton gin.

The original Whitney machine forced raw cotton up against a screen and ran a saw-tooth comb on the other side of the screen, pulling the cotton through. A second set or rollers gently lifted the cotton off the teeth and dropped it to a waiting basket below.

This first model had three advantages: 1) It straightened the strands of cotton very effectively compared to a hand picking method, 2) it very efficiently separated the fiber from the seed because the screen keeps the seeds out, and 3) it was a lot faster and little to no expertise was needed to run a cotton gin. Click HERE for an animated demonstration of Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin.

Contrary to popular belief, Whitney did not invent the cotton gin from thin air. His idea was an adaptation of existing technology, just as the first tablet computer was invented by Microsoft, not Apple.

In a letter to his father dated September 11, 1793, Eli Whitney said his new invention could, “do more than fifty men with the old machines.” (cotton acres) Old machines? But wasn’t Eli Whitney the genius pioneer of the Cotton Gin?

India had been using the Churka, the grandfather of the cotton gin, since 500 B.C.E. Before the famed cotton gin, the south used this tool as well. The Churka used teeth, like the cotton gin to pull cotton apart. It only worked on the more desirable Sea Island cotton, not Green Seed cotton. Sea Island cotton was longer and grew well close to the coast, hence its name. Green seed cotton was shorter and of lower quality, thus harder to pull apart and resulted in crushing of the seed and staining of the white cotton. As the colonist expanded into the interior of the south, they found shorter-grain cotton was the only cotton they could grow and the Churka became so useless that it was soon more effective to separate the plant by hand, slave hands, of course. This drove the price of cotton up so much that alternative materials such as wool and linen were soon preferred.

However, what counts is usage, and the cotton gin, just like the iPad, was quickly adopted.