cotton gin machine

A cotton gin—meaning “cotton engine”—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. 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.

cotton gin, machine for cleaning cotton of its seeds, invented in the United States by Eli Whitney in 1793. The cotton gin is an example of an invention directly called forth by an immediate demand; the mechanization of spinning in England had created a greatly expanded market for American cotton, whose production was inhibited by the slowness of manual removal of the seeds from the raw fibre.

Whitney, a Massachusetts Yankee visiting a friend in the South, learned of the problem and quickly solved it. Inspired by manual brushes invented by enslaved workers, Whitney crafted a device that pulled the cotton through a set of wire teeth mounted on a revolving cylinder, the fibre passing through narrow slots in an iron breastwork too small to permit passage of the seed. The simplicity of the invention—which could be powered by people, animals, or water—caused it to be widely copied despite Whitney’s patent; it is credited with fixing cotton cultivation, virtually to the exclusion of other crops, in the U.S. South and so institutionalizing slavery.

Purpose

Cotton fibers are produced in the seed pods (“bolls”) of the cotton plant where the fibers (“lint”) 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 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.

Mechanism

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 conveyor system. 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.

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Modern cotton gins

In modern cotton production, cotton arrives at industrial cotton gins either in trailers, in compressed rectangular “modules” weighing up to 10 metric tons each or in polyethylene wrapped round modules similar to a bale of hay produced during the picking process by the most recent generation of cotton pickers. Trailer cotton (i.e. cotton not compressed into modules) arriving at the gin is sucked in via a pipe, approximately 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter, that is swung over the cotton. This pipe is usually manually operated, but is increasingly automated in modern cotton plants. The need for trailers to haul the product to the gin has been drastically reduced since the introduction of modules. If the cotton is shipped in modules, the module feeder breaks the modules apart using spiked rollers and extracts the largest pieces of 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 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 auger conveyor system. 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.

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.

bombax cotton

bombax cotton, also called tree cotton, or vegetable down, seed floss of various trees of the Bombax genus of the Malvaceae family; the plants grow in tropical countries and are cultivated in the West Indies and Brazil. The seed floss’s individual fibres, soft and ranging from pale yellow to brown in colour, are about 0.5 to 3.25 cm (0.25 to 1.25 inches) long and 20 to 40 microns (a micron is about 0.00004 inch) in diameter. Unlike the fibres of common commercial cotton (Gossypium), bombax cotton fibres come from hairs that grow from the side of the seedpod instead of from the seed itself.

Although sometimes mixed with common-cotton fibres for spinning, bombax cotton is weaker and less elastic and contains the woody plant substance lignin, making it unsatisfactory for use alone as a textile fibre. The floss is used primarily as wadding and upholstery material.

Plants producing bombax cotton include Bombax septenatum, yielding the strongest and longest fibres, ranging from 2 to 3 cm (0.8 to 1.2 inches) in length, and B. ceiba, with fibres about 1 to 1.5 cm (0.4 to 0.6 inch) long, both growing in tropical areas of the Western Hemisphere, where the floss is sometimes called ceiba cotton or paina limpa. In southern Asia and Africa the fibres of B. malabarica, called simal cotton, or red silk cotton, in India, are about 1 to 2 cm long. The term tree cotton is also sometimes applied to floss obtained from Gossypium arboreum, a plant species growing chiefly in Asia.

King Cotton

King Cotton, phrase frequently used by Southern politicians and authors prior to the American Civil War, indicating the economic and political importance of cotton production. After the invention of the cotton gin (1793), cotton surpassed tobacco as the dominant cash crop in the agricultural economy of the South, soon comprising more than half the total U.S. exports.

The concept of “King Cotton” was first suggested in David Christy’s book Cotton Is King (1855). Convinced of the supremacy of its commodity at home and abroad, the South was confident of success if secession from the Union should lead to war. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senator James H. Hammond declaimed (March 4, 1858): “You dare not make war upon cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.”

The South was wrong. Skillful diplomacy by the North, coupled with English abolitionist allegiances and Confederate military failure at crucial stages of the war, kept Britain from intervening. Rather than enter the war on the side of the slave states, Britain developed alternate sources of cotton cultivation elsewhere in the empire. To the detriment of the entire region, the South continued after the war to be a one-crop economy until the 20th century, when the New Deal and World War II encouraged diversification and industrialization.

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