Cotton Gin
Many inventions are used for good as well as bad. The cotton gin was one such. It was invented by an American of the name El Whitney in 1793. The aim of the invention was to make cotton ginning faster and easier. It had the unfortunate result of making, slavery to last many decades making the life of black Americans miserable, until President Lincoln freed them in 1865, through a bitterly fought civil war.
El Whitney was born in a farmer’s family in Massachusetts, USA, and was gifted with mechanical skill and intelligence.
He was without job and in order to support himself, set up a small workshop making domestic appliances that made household work easy. On the advice of a friend, he turned to making a machine that made cotton ginning easy, and succeeded. He took a patent on it in 1793.
The process of separating fibres from the seeds of cotton is called ginning of cotton.
Old method of cotton ginning
New method of cotton ginning
