Sunday, December 28, 1997

Cotton gins were around long before Eli Whitney

By J.T. Smith / Abilene Reporter-News

There's no question that Eli Whitney's particular cotton gin caused a sea of white to begin spreading across the Deep South almost 205 years ago.

The enormous wealth of the agrarian South from cotton was destined to clash with the industrial North. Historians will note that while slavery helped ignite the War Between The States, the cotton gin had paved the way. Some 67 years after Whitney's invention, the North and South would go to war. By then, the South had stately homes and thriving cities that resulted from King Cotton.

Cotton was responsible for much of the U.S. economy. Such wealth would not have come into being without Whitney's cotton gin. Whitney's cotton gin is still the backbone of the saw gins that we use nowadays. They are just modern and extremely fast. But the principle of the saw gin is the same.

Fine tuning history

"Who invented the cotton gin, Dad?" asked my younger daughter while doing her homework. "And don't go into one of your long cotton speeches. I just need the name."

In elementary school -- or even high school -- that's usually the question. And the student writes "Eli Whitney" in the blank.

Dr. W. Stanley Anthony, heads the USDA Cotton Ginning Research Unit in Stoneville, Miss., and the award-winning researcher notes the answer isn't that simple. (Anthony co-edited the third edition The Cotton Ginners Handbook with noted USDA research leader William D. Mayfield).

Eli Whitney's patent for his "cotton machine" was March 14, 1794. (He's credited having put the gin together by 1793).

But Whitney wasn't the first or the only gin inventor.

"Churka gins had been invented more than 2,000 years ago and were still in use in this country for long-fiber cottons until the early 1800s," Anthony said.

Anthony notes that the churka gins used a pair of rollers to "pinch" the cotton fiber from the seeds.

Georgia actually was the first of the original 13 Colonies to purposely cultivate cotton in 1734. But the woody perennial was seen growing wild long before that -- in what is today Florida -- at the time of the Spanish explorers.

Whitney put some real "teeth" in the gin

Anthony notes that what Northerner Whitney did -- after moving from Massachusetts to Georgia -- was add "some teeth" to the cotton gin so it would work with short-fiber cotton so common to the South.

Whitney found that either metal sawteeth or spikes had the power to "tear" the tightly held cotton fibers away from the seeds.

Anthony noted that two years later, Henry Ogden Holmes, a South Carolina blacksmith, "rearranged Whitney's teeth" and added some slots to allow the seeds to fall out the bottom.

Holmes' work also was significant, since his modification eliminated the need to stop the gin to remove seeds.

Nevertheless, it was Whitney's manufacturing genius -- all those years ago -- that sparked the American system of mass production needed to handle a U.S. crop of better than 18 million bales from the 1997 harvest.

The 1997 Texas crop is going to come in at about 5-1/2 million bales.

The crop in the Abilene region, alone, amounts to more than a million bales. The fiber, cottonseed, hulls and oil have a gross value about $500 million to the area economy.

Layne Smith, Reporter-News graphics editor, decided to visit a cotton gin a see what makes it click.

He found that the saw gins for our short staple cotton still use the same principles as Eli Whitney. They're just mighty fast these days.

By the way -- despite his patent -- Whitney never realized much money off of his invention as folks rapidly copied his cotton machine.

In fact, Whitley turned his attention to firearms and was years ahead of Henry Ford in producing standardized parts. Whitley produced standardized parts for muskets.

Today, there are about 1,400 cotton gins in the United States.

I want to thank Sharla Harvey for giving Layne a grand tour of the Farmers Co-op Gin at Anson while it was humming.

The USDA ginning facility at Stoneville, Miss., also helped Layne get a clear picture of just how the ginning process works, as did the Texas Cotton Ginners Association office in Austin, the National Cotton Council in Memphis, Tenn. and John Fox of the USDA Cotton Classing Office in Abilene.

We deeply appreciate their guidance in this and hope you will enjoy Layne's depiction in today's Reporter-News. of how a typical cotton gin works.