A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The fibers are processed into clothing or other cotton goods, and any undamaged cotton was used for clothes. Seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil and meal.
Cotton fibers are produced in the seedpods of the cotton plant where the fibers in the bolls are tightly interwoven with seeds. To make the fibers usable, the seeds and fibers must first be separated, a task, which had been previously performed manually, with production of cotton requiring hundreds of hours of labor for the separation. Many simple seed-removing devices had been invented, but until the innovation of the cotton gin, most required significant operator attention and worked only on a small scale. …show more content…
Whitney applied for a patent 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. 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 Catherine Littlefield Greene suggested to Whitney the use of a brush-like component instrumental in separating out the seeds and cotton. To date, Greene's role in the invention of the gin has not been verified