Heard of but never saw a cotton gin
What is the hell is a cotton gin?
(author note) Every year in grade school we had to learn or re-learn the Industrial Revolution. I hated it. As you can read from earlier posts, I like history and culture. I read Jeff Shaara’s books. I like history mysteries.
The Industrial Revolution was boring. It's just memorizing names and inventions and dates. The worst part is that as I got older, some of those facts that I had to memorize weren’t entirely accurate. There were competing products or competing inventors. If two people invented the same thing but one person sold more, they got the entire credit.
History written by the winners.
I grew up in the Northeast. Every year, we learned that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. That invention would lead to greater production of cotton in the south and would lead to continuing slavery rather than kill it off. As someone from the Northeast, I had no idea what the hell the cotton gin was. I’ve never seen a cotton field or a cotton bulb.
Till, I looked up information for this blog.
In Dear Pen Pal, Joe makes the same complaint that I just did.
What the hell is the cotton gin?
Cotton grows around the seed. The cotton bulb would be picked and the cotton would have to be untangled by hand from the seed.
The cotton gin was a wood box with a wood drum. The cotton goes into a hopper, someone turns the cynlinder drum. This drum has metal teeth to separate the cotton and the seed which forces the seeds to fall to a plate while the cotton passes through a slot or mesh.
This could generate fifty-five pounds of cotton a day.
Very rudimentary cotton gins had been around for years. Whitney’s gin had teeth to separate the seed. He would apply for a patent in 1793, but patents were vague and slow so farmers made their own gins after they took a look at Whitney’s machine. These machines popped up on farms everywhere and Whitney had no legal protection. He had no one to sue or way to prove it. Whitney and his partner lost money on the invention.
Whitney would later make money producing interchangeable parts for muskets.
They never showed us a picture of what this machine was and people wonder why History isn't popular in school.
This information came from Wikipedia.
You can see a copy of the patent at www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent
www/juliantrubin.com/bigten/whitney-cottongin.html
The link to Dear Pen Pal.