A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, a job that otherwise must be performed painstakingly by hand. The fibers are processed into clothing or other cotton goods, and any undamaged seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil and meal.
Although simple handheld roller gins have been used since at least 500 AD, the first modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793, and patented in 1794. It 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. Whitney's gin revolutionised the cotton industry in the United States, but also led to the growth of slavery in the American South, and has been identified as a contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Modern automated cotton gins offer far higher productivity than their hand-powered forebears.
Read more about Cotton Gin: Modern Cotton Gins
Famous quotes containing the words cotton and/or gin:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
—Julius J. Epstein (1909–1952)