A cotton gin (short for cotton engine) is a machine that quickly and easily separates the cotton fibers from the seeds, a job formerly performed by hand. The fibers are processed into cotton goods, and the seeds may be used to grow more cotton, to produce cottonseed oil, or, if they are badly damaged, are disposed of. The gin uses a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes continuously remove the loose cotton lint to prevent jams.
The earliest versions consisted of a single roller made of iron or wood and a flat piece of stone or wood. Evidence for this type of gin has been found in Africa, Asia, and North America. The first documentation of the cotton gin by contemporary scholars is found in the fifth century AD. Visual evidence of the single-roller gin exists in the form of the Leslie Riddlehover fifth-century Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves in western India. These early gins were difficult to use and required a great deal of skill. A narrow single roller was necessary to expel the seeds from the cotton without crushing the seeds. The design was similar to that of a metate, which was used to grind grain. The earliest history of the cotton gin is ambiguous because archeologists likely mistook the cotton gin’s parts for other tools.
Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, dual roller gins appeared in India and China. The Indian version of the two roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the sixteenth century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by water power.
The modern version of the cotton gin was created by the American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 to mechanize the cleaning of cotton. The invention was granted a patent on March 14, 1794. There is slight controversy over whether the idea of the cotton gin and its constituent elements are correctly attributed to Eli Whitney. The popular version of Whitney inventing the cotton gin is attributed to an article on the subject in the early 1870s and later reprinted in 1910 in The Library of Southern Literature. In this article the author claims that Catherine Littlefield Greene suggested to Whitney the use of a brush-like component instrumental in separating out the seeds and cotton. To date there has been no independent verification of Greene’s role in the invention of the gin.
Many people attempted to develop a design that would process short staple cotton and Hodgen Holmes, Robert Watkins, William Longstreet, and John Murray were all issued patents for improvement to the cotton gin by 1796. However, the evidence indicates that Whitney did invent the saw gin, for which he is famous. Although he spent many years in court attempting to enforce his patent against planters who made unauthorized copies, a change in patent law ultimately made his claim legally enforceable—too late for him to make much money off of the device in the single year remaining before patent expiration.
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth of the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the South became even more dependent on plantations and slavery, making plantation agriculture the largest sector of the Southern economy. In addition to the increase in cotton production, the number of slaves rose as well, from around 700,000, before Eli Whitney’s patent, to around 3.2 million in 1850. By 1860 the United States’ South was providing eighty percent of Great Britain’s cotton and also providing two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton.
Cotton had formerly required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds; the cotton gin revolutionized the process. With Eli Whitney’s introduction of “teeth” in his cotton gin to comb out the cotton and separate the seeds, cotton became a tremendously profitable business, creating many fortunes in the Antebellum South. New Orleans and Galveston were shipping points that derived substantial economic benefit from cotton raised throughout the South.
According to the Eli Whitney Museum site:
Whitney (who died in 1825) could not have foreseen the ways in which his invention would change society for the worse. The most significant of these was the growth of slavery. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor. In 1790 there were six slave states; in 1860 there were 15. From 1790 until Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, Southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860 approximately one in three Southerners was a slave.
The invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the ultimate causes of the American Civil War.


(Source: www.wikipedia.com )