Cotton gin
A cotton gin — meaning "cotton engine"[1][2] — is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.[3] The fibers are then processed into various cotton goods such as calico, while any undamaged cotton is used largely for textiles like clothing. The separated seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil.
Handheld roller gins had been used in the Indian subcontinent since at earliest AD 500 and then in other regions.[4] The Indian worm-gear roller gin, invented sometime around the 16th century,[5] has, according to Lakwete, remained virtually unchanged up to the present time. A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794.
Whitney's gin 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. It revolutionized the cotton industry in the United States, but also inadvertently led to the growth of slavery in the American South. Whitney's gin made cotton farming more profitable,[citation needed] so plantation owners expanded their plantations and used more slaves to pick cotton. Whitney never invented the machine to harvest cotton: it still had to be picked by hand. The invention has thus been identified as an inadvertent contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War.[6] Modern automated cotton gins use multiple powered cleaning cylinders and saws, and offer far higher productivity than their hand-powered precursors.[7]
Purpose
Cotton fibers are produced in the seed pods ("bolls") of the
Mechanism
This section needs expansion with: details about other kinds of gins; Whitney's is not the only kind. You can help by adding to it. (February 2023) |
The gin is made with two rotating cylinders. The first cylinder has lines of teeth around the circumference, and angled against this cylinder is a metal plate with small holes, "ginning ribs", through which the teeth can fit with minimal gaps. The teeth grip the cotton as it rotates, dragging it through these small holes. The seeds are too big to fit through the holes, and are thus removed from the rotating cotton by the metal plate, before they fall into a collecting pot. On the other side of the first cylinder, there is a second cylinder, also rotating, with brushes attached. This second cylinder wipes the cotton from the first, and deposits it into the collecting bucket.
The seed is reused for planting or is sent to an oil mill to be further processed into cottonseed oil and cottonseed meal. 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.
History
A single-roller cotton gin came into use in India by the 5th century. An improvement invented in India was the two-roller gin, known as the "churka", "charki", or "wooden-worm-worked roller".[11]
Early cotton gins
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. The earliest evidence of the cotton gin is found in the fifth century, in the form of
Medieval India
Between the 12th and 14th 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 16th century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by waterpower.[12]
The
It was reported that, with an Indian cotton gin, which is half machine and half tool, one man and one woman could clean 28 pounds of cotton per day. With a modified Forbes version, one man and a boy could produce 250 pounds per day. If oxen were used to power 16 of these machines, and a few people's labor was used to feed them, they could produce as much work as 750 people did formerly.[16]
United States
The Indian roller cotton gin, known as the churka or charkha, was introduced to the United States in the mid-18th century, when it was adopted in the
Eli Whitney's patent
Eli Whitney (1765–1825) applied for a patent of his cotton gin on October 28, 1793; the patent was granted on March 14, 1794, but was not validated until 1807. Whitney's patent was assigned patent number 72X.[18] 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 Catharine Littlefield Greene suggested to Whitney the use of a brush-like component instrumental in separating out the seeds and cotton. To date, Greene's alleged role in the invention of the gin has not been verified independently.[19]
Whitney's cotton gin model was capable of cleaning 50 pounds (23 kg) of lint per day. The model consisted of a wooden cylinder covered by rows of slender wires which caught the fibers of the cotton bolls. Each row of wires then passed through the bars of a comb-like grid, pulling the cotton fibers through the grid as they did.[20] The comb-like teeth of the grids were closely spaced, preventing the seeds, fragments of the hard dried calyx of the original cotton flower, or sticks and other debris attached to the fibers from passing through. A series of brushes on a second rotating cylinder then brushed the now-cleaned fibers loose from the wires, preventing the mechanism from jamming.
Many contemporary inventors attempted to develop a design that would process
McCarthy's gin
While Whitney's gin facilitated the cleaning of seeds from short-staple cotton, it damaged the fibers of extra-long staple cotton (Gossypium barbadense). In 1840 Fones McCarthy received a patent for a "Smooth Cylinder Cotton-gin", a roller gin. McCarthy's gin was marketed for use with both short-staple and extra-long staple cotton but was particularly useful for processing long-staple cotton. After McCarthy's patent expired in 1861, McCarthy type gins were manufactured in Britain and sold around the world.[23] McCarthy's gin was adopted for cleaning the Sea Island variety of extra-long staple cotton grown in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. It cleaned cotton several times faster than the older gins, and, when powered by one horse, produced 150 to 200 pounds of lint a day.[24] The McCarthy gin used a reciprocating knife to detach seed from the lint. Vibration caused by the reciprocating motion limited the speed at which the gin could operate. In the middle of the 20th Century gins using a rotating blade replaced ones using a reciprocating blade. These descendants of the McCarthy gin are the only gins now used for extra-long staple cotton in the United States.[25]
Munger system gin
For a decade and a half after the end of the Civil War in 1865, a number of innovative features became widely used for ginning in the United States. They included steam power instead of animal power, an automatic feeder to assure that the gin stand ran smoothly, a condenser to make the clean cotton coming out of the gin easier to handle, and indoor presses so that cotton no longer had to be carried across the gin yard to be baled.[26] Then, in 1879, while he was running his father's gin in Rutersville, Texas, Robert S. Munger invented additional system ginning techniques. Robert and his wife, Mary Collett, later moved to Mexia, Texas, built a system gin, and obtained related patents.[27]
The Munger System Ginning Outfit (or system gin) integrated all the ginning operation machinery, thus assuring the cotton would flow through the machines smoothly. Such system gins use air to move cotton from machine to machine.[28] Munger's motivation for his inventions included improving employee working conditions in the gin. However, the selling point for most gin owners was the accompanying cost savings while producing cotton both more speedily and of higher quality.[29]
By the 1960s, many other advances had been made in ginning machinery, but the manner in which cotton flowed through the gin machinery continued to be the Munger system.[30]
Economic Historian William H. Phillips referred to the development of system ginning as "The Munger Revolution" in cotton ginning.[31] He wrote,
"The Munger innovations were the culmination of what geographer Charles S. Aiken has termed the second ginning revolution, in which the privately owned plantation gins were replaced by large-scale public ginneries. This revolution, in turn, led to a major restructuring of the cotton gin industry, as the small, scattered gin factories and shops of the nineteenth century gave way to a dwindling number of large twentieth-century corporations designing and constructing entire ginning operations."[32]
One of the few (and perhaps only) examples of a Munger gin left in existence is on display at Frogmore Plantation in Louisiana.
Effects in the United States
Prior to the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin, cotton had required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds.
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 region became even more dependent on
The invention of the cotton gin led to an increase in the use of slaves on Southern plantations. Because of that inadvertent effect on American slavery, which ensured that the South's economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture (while encouraging the growth of the textile industry elsewhere, such as in the North), the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of the American Civil War.[39][6][40]
Modern cotton gins
In modern cotton production, cotton arrives at industrial cotton gins either in trailers, in compressed rectangular "
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 soil 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
Modern cotton gins create a substantial amount of cotton gin residue (CGR) consisting of sticks, leaves, dirt, immature bolls, and cottonseed. Research is currently under way to investigate the use of this waste in producing ethanol. Due to fluctuations in the chemical composition in processing, there is difficulty in creating a consistent ethanol process, but there is potential to further maximize the utilization of waste in the cotton production.[42][7]
See also
References
Notes
- ^ [1]
- ^ [2]
- ^ ISBN 978-0-917914-73-7).
- ^ a b c d Lakwete, 1–6.
- ISBN 9788131727911– via Google Books.
- ^ a b Kelly, Kelly (July 21, 2020). "What Were the Top 4 Causes of the Civil War". ThoughtCo. Retrieved September 11, 2023.
- ^ a b inventors.about.com; "Background on the Cotton Gin", retrieved October 22, 2010.
- ^ Oosterhuis, Derrick; Stewart, Mac; Guthrie, Dave (August 1994). "Cotton Fruit Development: the Boll" (PDF). Cotton Physiology Today. Retrieved February 16, 2024.
- ^ Bellis, Mary. "The Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney". inventors.about.com. Retrieved March 12, 2012.
- ^ Lakwete, 182.
- ^ "Making Cotton – The Tools of The Trade". Fifteeneightyfour – Academic Perspectives from Cambridge University Press. June 5, 2013. Retrieved September 9, 2018.
- ISBN 0-7914-2919-9.
- ^ Irfan Habib (2011), Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500, p. 53, Pearson Education
- ^ Irfan Habib (2011), Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500, pp. 53–54, Pearson Education
- ^ Irfan Habib (2011), Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500, p. 54, Pearson Education
- ^ Karl Marx (1867). Chapter 16: "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry". Das Kapital.
- ^ Hargrett, Elizabeth; Dobbs, Chris (June 6, 2017). "Cotton Gins". New Georgia Encyclopedia.
- ^ "Who Invented the Cotton Gin and How Did it Impact History?". Archived from the original on March 21, 2014.
- ^ "Catharine Littlefield Greene, Brain Behind the Cotton Gin". Finding Dulcinea. March 4, 2010. Retrieved November 6, 2013.
- ^ Harr, M. E. (1977). Mechanics of particulate media: A probabilistic approach. McGraw-Hill.
- ^ Lakwete, 64–76.
- ^ The American Historical Review by Henry Eldridge Bourne, Robert Livingston Schuyler Editors: 1895 – July 1928; J.F. Jameson and others.; Oct. 1928–Apr. 1936, H.E. Bourne and others; July 1936–Apr. 1941, R.L. Schuyler and others; July 1941– G.S. Ford and others. Published 1991, American Historical Association [etc.], pp 90–101.
- ^ Lakwete, Angela. "Fones McCarthy". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Auburn University. Retrieved October 13, 2017.
- ^ Shofner, Jerrel H.; Rogers, William Warren (April 1962). "Sea Island Cotton in Ante-Bellum Florida". The Florida Historical Quarterly. 40 (4): 378–79.
- ISBN 9780788124204. Retrieved October 13, 2017.
- ^ Aiken, Charles S. (April 1973). "The Evolution of Cotton Ginning in the Southeastern United States". Geographical Review. 63 (2): 205.
- ISBN 978-0-316-24775-7.
- ^ Atkinson, Edward (June 1, 1880). "Report on the Cotton Manufacturers of the United States". In Department of Interior, Census Office. Report on the Manufacturers of the United States at the Tenth Census. Government Printing Office. pp. 937–984.
- ISBN 978-0-316-24775-7.
- ^ Aiken, Charles S. (April 1973). "The Evolution of Cotton Ginning in the Southeastern United States". Geographical Review. 63 (2): 205–206.
- ^ Phillips, William (1994). "Making a Business of It: The Evolution of Southern Cotton Gin Patenting, 1831-1890". Agricultural History. 68 (2): 88, 90.
- ^ Phillips, William (1994). "Making a Business of It: The Evolution of Southern Cotton Gin Patenting, 1831-1890". Agricultural History. 68 (2): 85–86.
- ^ Hamner, Christopher. teachinghistory.org, "The Disaster of Innovation", retrieved July 11, 2011.
- ^ Pierson, Parke (September 2009). "Seeds of conflict". America's Civil War. 22 (4): 25.
- ^ Woods, Robert (September 1, 2009). "A Turn of the Crank Started the Civil War." Mechanical Engineering.
- ^ Smith, N. Jeremy (July 2009). "Making Cotton King". World Trade. 22 (7): 82.
- ^ Robert O. Woods (December 28, 2010). "How the Cotton Gin Started the Civil War". The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
- ^ Underhill, Paco (2008). "The cotton gin, oil, robots and the store of 2020". Display & Design Ideas. 20 (10): 48.
- ISBN 978-1-4214-1940-4.
- ^ Ryan, Joe. "What Caused the American Civil War". Retrieved September 11, 2023.
- ^ "Page 3 : USDA ARS". www.ars.usda.gov. Retrieved November 25, 2021.
- ISBN 978-1-4612-6592-4.
Bibliography
- Lakwete, Angela (2003). Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801873942.
External links
- 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 via YouTube
- "The Old Cotton-gin" By John Trotwood Moore · 1910 [3]