Cotton Gin

A cotton gin is a machine that quickly separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing far greater productivity than manual separation by hand. Handheld roller gins had existed in India since around 500 AD, and an Indian worm-gear roller gin appeared around the 16th century, but the American inventor Eli Whitney built the modern mechanical cotton gin in 1793 and received a United States patent for it in 1794. Whitney's gin made cotton farming dramatically more profitable and drove explosive growth in United States cotton production, and because harvesting remained manual even as ginning was mechanized, the invention also increased demand for enslaved labor, a link historians frequently cite as an indirect cause of the American Civil War.