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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 separated seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil .
In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and later received a patent on March 14, 1794. [31] Whitney's cotton gin could have possibly ignited a revolution in the cotton industry and the rise of "King Cotton" as the main cash crop in the South. However, it never made him rich.
In the colonial era, small amounts of high quality long-staple cotton were produced in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Inland, only short-staple cotton could be grown but it was full of seeds and very hard to process into fiber. The invention of the cotton gin in the late 1790s for the first time made short-staple cotton usable ...
This was easier to process by hand than short-staple cotton. In the Upcountry's soil, only short-staple cotton could be cultivated. It was extremely labor-intensive to process by hand. In 1793, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin made processing of short-staple cotton economically viable. Upcountry landowners began to increase their ...
Planters needed cotton gins to process their cotton profitably, as the machinery was much more efficient than manual labor. Eventually Ellison earned enough to buy land: starting with more than 50 acres (20 ha), by 1850 he had increased his holdings to 386 acres (156 ha), and established his own cotton plantation. By that time, he owned 32 slaves.
Upland or green seeded cotton was not a commercially important crop until the invention of an improved cotton gin in 1793. With an inexpensive cotton gin a man could remove seed from as much cotton in one day as a woman could de-seed in two months working at a rate of about one pound per day. [12]
Mulberry Grove Plantation, located north of Port Wentworth, Chatham County, Savannah, was a rice plantation, notable as the location where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. [ 2 ] Once a thriving plantation, comprising, in 1798, some
The invention of the cotton gin by American inventor Eli Whitney, combined with the widespread prevalence of slavery in the United States and U.S. settler expansion made cotton potentially a cheap and readily available resource for use in the new textile industry.