Universal Encyclopedia
What was the cotton gin?
The cotton gin was a machine patented by Eli Whitney in 1794 that separated cotton fiber from its seeds: wire teeth on a rotating cylinder pulled the lint through a mesh too fine for the seeds, cleaning in hours what took a worker a full day by hand. It made short-staple cotton — growable across the South — suddenly profitable.
Last updated: October 2026
Whitney hoped mechanization would make slavery obsolete. The opposite happened: cheap cleaning made cotton the world's most lucrative crop, planters expanded westward, and American cotton output and the enslaved population exploded together — the gin became one of history's starkest lessons that technology amplifies the system it serves.