Cotton gin timeline ☺

backround info

A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates the cotton fibers from the seeds, a job previously done by hand. These seeds are either used again to grow more cotton or, if badly damaged, are disposed of. It uses a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through the screen, while brushes continuously remove the loose cotton lint to prevent jams.

Time line

The earliest versions consisted of a single roller made of iron or wood and a flat piece of stone or wood.

The first documentation of the cotton gin by contemporary scholars is found in the fifth century AD. Visual evidence of the single-roller gin exists in the form of fifth-century Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves in western India.
These early gins were difficult to use and required a great deal of skill.
A narrow single roller was necessary to expel the seeds from the cotton without crushing the seeds. The design was similar to that of a metate (a stone thing), which was used to grind grain.

The earliest history of the cotton gin is not so believed, because archeologists likely mistook the cotton gin's parts for other tools.

<<<<"The First Cotton Gin" - 1869. This carving depicts a roller gin,

Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, dual roller gins appeared in India and China. The Indian version of the two roller gin was throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the sixteenth century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by water power
The modern version of the cotton gin was created by the American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 to mechanize the cleaning of cotton.
Many people attempted to develop a design that would process short staple cotton; Hodgen Holmes, Robert Watkins, William Longstreet, and John Murray were all issued patents for improvement to the cotton gin by 1796

The modern process

Cotton arrives at the gin compressed. The feeder breaks them apart using spiked rollers and extracts some foreign material from the cotton. The dryer 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 dirt and leaves passes through rods or screens for removal. The stick machine uses centrifugal force to remove large 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. which pull the fibers from the seeds which are too small to pass through.. The bale press then compresses the cotton into bales for storage and shipping.