A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, Connecticut.

Eli Whitney's original cotton gin patent, dated March 14, 1794.

"The First Cotton Gin", an engraving from Harper's Magazine, 1869. This carving depicts a roller gin, which preceded Eli Whitney's invention.^[1]

An 1896 advertisement for the Lummus cotton gin.

A cotton gin (short for cotton engine)^[2] 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.

Although simple handheld roller gins have been used since at least 500 AD,^[3] 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. Larger, more complex, automated cotton gins remain a crucial part of the cotton industry today.^[4]

History[link]

The problem[link]

Cotton fibres are produced in the seed pods ("bolls") of the cotton plant; as a result, the fibres ("lint") in the bolls are interspersed with the seeds. The seeds must be removed from the lint in order to make the fibres useable. Historically, this task was performed by hand: production of cotton required hundreds of man-hours to separate the seeds from a useful amount of lint. Many simple seed-removing devices have been invented over the years, but most required significant operator attention and worked on a small scale.^[5]

Early cotton gins[link]

The earliest versions of the cotton gin 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, in the form of Buddhist paintings depicting a single-roller gin 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 early history of the cotton gin is ambiguous, because archeologists likely mistook the cotton gin's parts for other tools.^[3]

Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, dual-roller gins appeared in India and China. The Indian version of the dual-roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the sixteenth century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by water power.^[6]

Eli Whitney's patent[link]

The modern mechanical cotton gin was invented in the United States in 1793 by Eli Whitney (1765–1825). Whitney applied for a patent on October 28, 1793; the patent was granted on March 14, 1794, but was not validated until 1807. There is slight controversy over whether the idea of the modern cotton gin and its constituent elements are correctly attributed to Eli Whitney. The popular image of Whitney inventing the cotton gin is attributed to an article on the subject written in the early 1870s and later reprinted in 1910 in The Library of Southern Literature. In this article, the author claimed 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 contemporary inventors attempted to develop a design that would process short staple cotton, and Hodgen Holmes, Robert Watkins, William Longstreet, and John Murray had all been issued patents for improvements to the cotton gin by 1796.^[7] 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 from the device in the single year remaining before the patent expired.^[8]

Whitney's design[link]

Whitney's cotton gin model was capable of cleaning 50 pounds (23 kg) of lint per day. The model consisted of a wooden cylinder surrounded by rows of slender spikes, which pulled the lint through the bars of a comb-like grid.^[9] The grids were closely spaced, preventing the seeds from passing through. Loose cotton was brushed off, preventing the mechanism from jamming.

Effects of the cotton gin in the United States[link]

Prior to the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin, cotton had required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds.^[10] 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. Additionally, the greatly expanded supply of cotton created strong demand for textile machinery and improved machine designs that replaced wooden parts with metal. This led to the invention of many machine tools in the early 19th century.^[11]

The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in 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, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of the Southern economy.^[12] The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850.^[13] By 1860, the southern states were providing two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton, and up to eighty percent of the crucial British market.^[14]

According to the Eli Whitney Museum website:

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.^[15]

Due to its inadvertent effect on American slavery, the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the ultimate causes of the American Civil War.^[16][17][18]

Modern cotton gins[link]

Diagram of a modern cotton gin plant, displaying numerous stages of production.

In modern cotton production, cotton arrives at cotton gins either in trailers or in compressed "modules", which weigh up to ten metric tons each. The need for trailers to haul the product to the gin has been drastically reduced since the introduction of the module. Cotton arriving in trailers is sucked into the gin via a pipe, approximately 16 inches (400 mm) in diameter, that is swung over the cotton. This pipe is usually manually operated, but is increasingly automated in modern cotton plants. If the cotton is shipped in modules, the module feeder breaks the modules apart using spiked rollers and extracts foreign material from the cotton. The module feeder's loose cotton is then sucked into the same starting point as the trailer cotton.

The cotton then enters a dryer, which removes excess moisture. The cylinder cleaner uses six or seven rotating spiked cylinders to break up large clumps of cotton. Finer foreign material, such as dirt and leaves, passes through rods or screens for removal. The stick machine uses centrifugal force to remove larger foreign matter, such as sticks and burrs, while the cotton is held by rapidly rotating saw cylinders.

The gin stand uses the teeth of rotating saws to pull the cotton through a series of "ginning ribs", which pull the fibers from the seeds which are too large to pass through the ribs. The cleaned seed is then removed from the gin via an auger system. The seed is reused for planting or is sent to an oil mill to be further processed into usable items. The lint cleaners again use saws and grid bars, this time to separate immature seeds and any remaining foreign matter from the fibers. The bale press then compresses the cotton into bales for storage and shipping. Modern gins can process up to 15 tonnes (33,000 lb) of cotton per hour.^[4]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• American Historical Association. "Correspondence of Eli Whitney Relative to the Invention of the Cotton Gin". The American Historical Review, October 1897, Vol. 3, Is. 1, p. 90-127.
• Baber, Zaheer. The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. ISBN 0-7914-2919-9.
• "Cotton--a history". New Internationalist. April 2007, Is. 399, p. 18-19.
• Lakwete, Angela. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
• Philips, William H. "Cotton Gin". Economic History Association
• Parke Pierson. "Seeds of conflict". America's Civil War, September 2009, Vol. 22, Is. 4, p. 25.
• Smith, N. Jeremy. "Making Cotton King". World Trade. July 2009, Vol. 22, Is. 7, p. 82.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cotton gins

• Overview of a Cotton Gin - USDA site
• The Story of Cotton - National Cotton Council of America site
• National Cotton Ginners Association
• US Cotton Gin Industry (EH.Net Encyclopedia of Economic History)
• Invention of Cotton Gin - eHistory.com
• Cotton: the fiber of life includes a schematic diagram illustrating the seed removal process
• Video of manual cotton gin in operation

Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney, painted by Samuel F. B. Morse, 1822. Yale University Art Gallery
Born	December 8, 1765 Westborough, Massachusetts
Died	January 8, 1825 (aged 59) New Haven, Connecticut
Nationality	American
Education	Yale College
Children	4
Parents	Eli Whitney, Elizabeth Fay
Signature
Work
Significant projects	Interchangeable parts, cotton gin

Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.^[1] Whitney's invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States (regardless of whether Whitney intended that or not). Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost many profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned his attention into securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets for the newly formed continental army. He continued making arms and inventing until his death in 1825.

Early life[link]

Petition by Whitney to the selectmen of Westborough to run a public school, with sample of his penmanship

Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest child of Eli Whitney Sr., a prosperous farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Fay of Westborough.

Although the younger Eli, born in 1765, could technically be called a "Junior", history has never known him as such. He was famous during his lifetime and afterward by the name "Eli Whitney". His son, born in 1820, also named Eli, was well known during his lifetime and afterward by the name "Eli Whitney, Jr."

Whitney's mother, Elizabeth Fay, died in 1777, when he was 11.^[2] At age 14 he operated a profitable nail manufacturing operation in his father's workshop during the Revolutionary War.^[3]

Because his stepmother opposed his wish to attend college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and schoolteacher to save money. He prepared for Yale at Leicester Academy (now Becker College) and under the tutelage of Rev. Elizur Goodrich of Durham, Connecticut, he entered the Class of 1789, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792.^[1][4] Whitney expected to study law but, finding himself short of funds, accepted an offer to go to South Carolina as a private tutor.

Instead of reaching his destination, he was convinced to visit Georgia.^[3] In the closing years of the 18th century, Georgia was a magnet for New Englanders seeking their fortunes (its Revolutionary-era governor had been Lyman Hall, a migrant from Connecticut). When he initially sailed for South Carolina, among his shipmates were the widow and family of Revolutionary hero, Gen. Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. Mrs. Greene invited Whitney to visit her Georgia plantation, Mulberry Grove. Her plantation manager and husband-to-be was Phineas Miller, another Connecticut migrant and Yale graduate (Class of 1785), who would become Whitney's business partner.

Whitney is most famous for two innovations which later divided the United States in the mid-19th century: the cotton gin (1793) and his advocacy of interchangeable parts. In the South, the cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was harvested and reinvigorated slavery. In the North the adoption of interchangeable parts revolutionized the manufacturing industry, and contributed greatly to their victory in the Civil War.^[5]

Career inventions[link]

Interchangeable parts[link]

First contract of Eli Whitney as a firearms manufacturer, 1786. Signed by Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury.

Eli Whitney has often been incorrectly credited with inventing the idea of interchangeable parts, which he championed for years as a maker of muskets; however, the idea predated Whitney, and Whitney's role in it was one of promotion and popularizing, not invention. Successful implementation of the idea eluded Whitney, but it finally happened near the end of his life, occurring first in others' armories.

Attempts at interchangeability of parts can be traced back as far as the Punic Wars through both archaeological remains of boats now in Museo Archeologico Baglio Anselmi and contemporary written accounts.^{[citation needed]} In modern times the idea developed over decades among many people. An early leader was Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, an 18th century French artillerist, who created a fair amount of standardization of artillery pieces, although not true interchangeability of parts. He inspired others, including Honoré Blanc and Louis de Tousard, to work further on the idea, and on shoulder weapons as well as artillery. In the 19th century these efforts produced the "armory system," or American system of manufacturing. Certain other New Englanders, including Captain John H. Hall and Simeon North, arrived at successful interchangeability before Whitney's armory did. The Whitney armory finally succeeded not long after his death in 1825.

The motives behind Whitney's acceptance of a contract to manufacture muskets in 1798 were mostly monetary. By the late 1790s, Whitney was on the verge of bankruptcy and the cotton gin litigation had left him deeply in debt. His New Haven cotton gin factory had burned to the ground, and litigation sapped his remaining resources. The French Revolution had ignited new conflicts between Great Britain, France, and the United States. The new American government, realizing the need to prepare for war, began to rearm. The War Department issued contracts for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets. Whitney, who had never made a gun in his life, obtained a contract in January 1798 to deliver 10,000 to 15,000 muskets in 1800. He had not mentioned interchangeable parts at that time. Ten months later, Treasury Secretary Wolcott sent him a "foreign pamphlet on arms manufacturing techniques," possibly one of Honoré Blanc's reports, after which Whitney first began to talk about interchangeability.

In May 1798, Congress voted for legislation that would use eight hundred thousand dollars in order to pay for small arms and cannons in case war with France erupted. They offered a 5,000 dollar incentive with an additional 5,000 dollars once that money was exhausted for the person that was able to accurately produce arms for the government. Because the cotton gin had not brought Whitney the rewards he believed he would get, he accepted the contract. Although the contract was for one year, Whitney did not deliver the arms until eight years later in 1809 using multiple excuses for the delay of such. Recently, historians have found that during 1801–1806, Whitney took the money and headed into South Carolina in order to profit from the cotton gin.^[6]

Although Whitney's demonstration of 1801 appeared to show the ingenuity of interchangeable parts, Merritt Roe Smith concludes that Whitney's demonstration was "staged" and "duped government authorities" into believing that he had created interchangeable parts. The charade was only useful in order to gain more time and resources into the project but not to create interchangeable parts.^[7]

When the government complained that Whitney's price per musket compared unfavorably with those produced in government armories, Whitney was able to calculate an actual price per musket by including fixed costs such as insurance and machinery, which the government had not included. He thus made early contributions to both the concept of cost accounting, and the concept of the efficiency of private industry.

Cotton gin[link]

A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum.

The cotton gin is a mechanical device that removes the seeds from cotton, a process that had previously been extremely labor intensive. The word 'gin' is short for engine. The cotton gin was a wooden drum stuck with hooks that pulled the cotton fibers through a mesh. The cotton seeds would not fit through the mesh and fell outside. Whitney occasionally told a story wherein he was pondering an improved method of seeding the cotton when he was inspired by observing a cat attempting to pull a chicken through a fence, and could only pull through some of the feathers.

A single cotton gin could generate up to 55 pounds (25 kg) of cleaned cotton daily. This contributed to the economic development of the Southern states of the United States, a prime cotton growing area; some historians believe that this invention allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable at a critical point in its development.

Whitney received a patent (later numbered as X72) for his cotton gin on March 14, 1794; however, it was not validated until 1807. Whitney and his partner Miller did not intend to sell the gins. Rather, like the proprietors of grist and sawmills, they expected to charge farmers for cleaning their cotton – two-fifths of the value, paid in cotton. Resentment at this scheme, the mechanical simplicity of the device and the primitive state of patent law, made infringement inevitable. Whitney and Miller could not build enough gins to meet demand, so gins from other makers found ready sale. Ultimately, patent infringement lawsuits consumed the profits and their cotton gin company went out of business in 1797.^[3] One oft-overlooked point is that there were drawbacks to Whitney's first design. There is significant evidence that the design flaws were solved by plantation owner Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of American Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene; Whitney gave her no public credit or recognition.^[8]

While the cotton gin did not earn Whitney the fortune he had hoped for, it did give him fame.

It has been argued by some historians that Whitney's cotton gin was an important if unintended cause of the American Civil War. Before the invention of the cotton gin, slavery had been on the decline; in fact many slaveholders had even given away their slaves, including George Washington. After Whitney's invention, the plantation slavery industry was rejuvenated, eventually culminating in the Civil War.^[9]

And the cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and the national economy.^[10] Southern cotton found ready markets in Europe and in the burgeoning textile mills of New England. Cotton exports from the U.S. boomed after the cotton gin's appearance – from less than 500,000 pounds (230,000 kg) in 1793 to 93 million pounds by 1810.^[11] Cotton was a staple that could be stored for long periods and shipped long distances, unlike most agricultural products. It became the U.S.'s chief export, representing over half the value of U.S. exports from 1820 to 1860.

Paradoxically, the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, helped preserve slavery in the U.S. Before the 1790s, slave labor was primarily employed in growing rice, tobacco, and indigo, none of which were especially profitable any more. Neither was cotton, due to the difficulty of seed removal. But with the gin, growing cotton with slave labor became highly profitable – the chief source of wealth in the American South, and the basis of frontier settlement from Georgia to Texas. "King Cotton" became a dominant economic force, and slavery was sustained as a key institution of Southern society.

Milling machine[link]

Machine tool historian Joseph W. Roe credited Whitney with inventing the first milling machine circa 1818. Subsequent work by other historians (Woodbury; Smith; Muir; Battison [cited by Baida^[12]]) suggests that Whitney was among a group of contemporaries all developing milling machines at about the same time (1814 to 1818), and that the others were more important to the innovation than Whitney was. (The machine that excited Roe may not have been built until 1825, after Whitney's death.) Therefore, no one person can properly be described as the inventor of the milling machine.

Later life and legacy[link]

Eli Whitney on US Postage Issue of 1940, 1c

Despite his humble origins, Whitney was keenly aware of the value of social and political connections. In building his arms business, he took full advantage of the access that his status as a Yale alumnus gave him to other well-placed graduates, such as Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr. (Class of 1778) and New Haven developer and political leader James Hillhouse.

His 1817 marriage to Henrietta Edwards, granddaughter of the famed evangelist Jonathan Edwards, daughter of Pierpont Edwards, head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, and first cousin of Yale's president, Timothy Dwight, the state's leading Federalist, further tied him to Connecticut's ruling elite. In a business dependent on government contracts, such connections were essential to success.

Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8, 1825, in New Haven, Connecticut, just a month after his 59th birthday. He left a widow and his four children behind. During the course of his illness, he invented and constructed several devices to mechanically ease his pain. These devices, drawings of which are in his collected papers, were effective but were never manufactured for use of others due to his heirs' reluctance to trade in "indelicate" items.

The Eli Whitney Students Program, Yale University's admissions program for non-traditional students, is named after Whitney who matriculated into Yale when he was 23.^[13]

See also[link]

• Whitney family

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• The Eli Whitney Museum
• Eli Whitney Biography on at Whitney Research Group
• Inventor of the Week: Eli Whitney (MIT)
• Entry in New Georgia Encyclopedia
•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Whitney, Eli". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Letter from Eli Whitney to his Father regarding his invention of the cotton gin, September 11, 1793
• Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Eli Whitney, Jr. regarding his cotton gin patent, November 16, 1793
• Obituary for Eli Whitney, in Niles Weekly Register, January 25, 1825