🌱 ⚙️ 1794
Cotton Gin
U.S. Patent X72 · 1794
From the abstract
The Cotton Gin is a machine for separating the seeds, husks, and other foreign matter from cotton... a roller of cylindrical form, with rows of teeth fixed in it, revolves so as to bring the teeth between the bars of a grate, the spaces of which are too small to admit the seed.
Note
Filed October 28, 1793; granted March 14, 1794. Whitney's machine made short-staple cotton commercially viable — and, in doing so, entrenched and expanded American slavery for the next seventy years. The cotton crop went from 750,000 pounds in 1790 to 85 million pounds by 1810. Whitney spent most of the patent's term in litigation; the design was so simple it could be (and was) copied by anyone with a workshop. He made his money later, on interchangeable-parts musket contracts. The original X72 was reconstructed after the 1836 Patent Office fire.