Talk:Cotton gin

Question about what the cotton gin actually does

My son's public school teacher told him that lives of slaves were easier because the slaves no longer had to pull the cotton from the thorny bur, however Genevieve Foster's "George Washington's World" states that:

"Eli Whitney had always enjoyed tinkering, and here was a challenge. Could he make a gadget that would quickly separate the seeds from the cotton? Yes, he could. The cotton gin that he invented was snapped up by the cotton planters. Within a few years it meant that a great many more acres of cotton were planted. Instead of needing fewer slaves, the plantations now needed many more to plant and pick all this cotton."

Referring to this page: http://www.cottonsjourney.com/Storyofcotton/page3.asp for a description of the cotton plant itself:

Does the cotton gin pull the cotton from the sharp thorny bur, or pull seeds out of the cotton locks?

That is to say, did the slaves have to tear their fingers up pulling the soft insides from the thorny plant, or did the cotton gin do that nasty chore for them?

Madiantin (talk) 18:37, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

The cotton was picked by hand. The cotton gin just separated the useful part from the un-useful parts. CsikosLo (talk) 11:07, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

The cotton gin pulls the cotton fibers off of the seeds. There are several different mechanical methods for removing fiber from the seeds, but the Eli Whitney saw-type ginning method is the most common.

The plant stalk itself is not thorny. When cotton is picked by hand, the locks are removed from from the sharp, pointed hull that surround the locks of cotton. Cotton develops inside of a protective casing that opens up as the cotton matures. The segemented casing looks a little like a small, rounded football that splits open at one end, creating a shell surrounding its contents. Each petal-shaped shell segment dries out and become hard, and is refered to as a bur. Cotton is still harvested by hand in some parts of the world today. --Servile (talk) 02:55, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I was also taught in school that the cotton gin was a contributing factor in ~ending~ slavery by making cotton processing require less work (as indeed the industrial revolution overall moved things away from laborious farming toward factory work). I think this needs to be addressed in the article at least, if something so widespread is a misconception. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.94.57.191 (talk) 09:02, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

this sentence is incomprehensible

"Handheld roller gins had been used in the Indian subcontinent since at earliest 500 and then in other regions." Adolescentgrandpa (talk) 04:29, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

It made sense to me, but I have replaced "then" with "later" as a clarification. Donald Albury 11:53, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

@2001:14bb:696:bd9:20ba:dbc8:344b:38fd looks like you had an issue with the same sentence. It would be better to rewrite the sentence than to remove it and its reference as they make for valid content. Kingsacrificer (talk) 20:25, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Was the inventor really trying to reduce slavery?

"This inadvertently led to an increase in the use of slaves. Whitney had hoped his invention would do the opposite by reducing the amount of labor needed to process cotton, but he never invented a machine to harvest cotton."

Eli Whitney's Wikipedia page makes no mention of abolitionism, and I can't find a reliable source for the claim. ~2026-34117-28 (talk) 07:53, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

I do not have access to Follett, Beckert, Coclanis, & Hahn, so, assuming good faith, I am not prepared to remove the statement. Best result would be someone checking to book to determine whether it does support the statement. I think it is a reasonable assumption that Whitney hoped his invention would reduce the labor involved in cleaning seeds from cotton boles, but that would not necessarily have made him an abolitionist. Donald Albury 15:14, 9 June 2026 (UTC)