Every wonder the history of the cotton gin? Put on your learning hats, it’s time for a quick history lesson in cotton farming. Keep reading to find out the history of the cotton gin, who invented the cotton gin, and how cotton farming has effected the world as we know it.
History of the Cotton Gin
Eli Whitney was born in 1765 in Massachusetts. He studied at Yale University and graduated with the intention to practice law. But, since a man still has to pay the bills, he traveled South to Georgia in 1792 to work as a tutor. After arriving, he learned that his agreed-upon wage was cut in half and he accepted a position from American Revolutionary War widow, Catherine Greene, to live on her plantation, Mulberry Grove, and read law.
After staying there for a short time, he learned about cotton production, the plantation’s primary crop. With tobacco, the South’s previously popular crop in decline, cotton became the main income of farmers. The problem was that the variety that grew in the Southern climate, short staple cotton, was extremely difficult to clean. Unlike its brethren, long staple cotton which grew on the coast and was easier to clean, the short staple variety has seeds that stuck to the fibers and had to be painstakingly separated by hand.
Whitney, who grew up on a farm and had a working knowledge of farming equipment, saw this problem and decided to devise a solution. He created the cotton gin, “gin” being short for “engine”. The gin used a small hand crank to clean the cotton. Later, larger models would be pulled by horse and, eventually, steam-driven.
Here’s how the cotton gin works:
Whitney’s device included a process in which cotton bolls (the seed pod the cotton grows around) are loaded into one side of the gin.
The hand crank feeds the bolls under a cylinder containing wire teeth which combs out the seeds and traps the cotton.
The cleaned cotton is then removed from the wire teeth.
The cotton gin allowed up to fifty pounds of cotton to be cleaned a day compared to a previous one pound a day using the method of cleaning by hand.
Whitney teamed up with Phineas Miller, Greene’s plantation manager and fiance, and formed a manufacturing company to produce his new invention. In 1794, they received a patent for the cotton gin.
After hearing of this amazing, modern innovation, cotton farmers everywhere wanted one. Originally, Whitney and Miller drafted a plan to install cotton gins on plantations in the surrounding area in exchange for a portion of the plantation owner’s profits brought in by the cotton. While this idea make logical sense – farmers would produce and export up to fifty times more cotton so, of course, they wouldn’t mind sharing some of the profits with the inventor – most farmers scoffed at the idea of giving up a significant amount of their income. Instead, they took advantage of the loose parameters of the day’s patent laws and completely ripped off the idea and began making their own variations of the cotton gin often with improvements on the original design.
Though the patent laws were eventually changed, Whitney spent subsequent years in legal battles and eventually agreed to license his design for an affordable price. Sadly, while farmers reaped incredible financial gain from Eli Whitney’s invention, he saw very little monetary profit from his creation.
Even though development of the cotton gin did little for Whitney’s financial success, it forever revolutionized the way cotton was generated in the American South. By the middle of the 19th century, raw cotton production doubled and was the country’s leading export.
Check out the Ginning Process Here:
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