Just Curious

about cotton

Last night I went to sleep thinking that I would look up how cotton was processed. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. It was to separate the seed from the cotton. "Gin" is short for engine. The last 2 things I didn't know....because I had never thought about it. :-)

On the way home from taking one of the kids to school in Pensacola - - we stopped along side the road where there was a cotton field and I picked a couple of pods. I had never seen a cotton field before that and I thought Andrew could take the pods to school for "show and tell". That stubborn little boy refused! Too shy. He got over that - later.

I remember that the cotton looked just like a cotton ball but with a lot of seeds in it. Before the gin it took a person (slave) all day to get 1 lb of cotton separated from the seeds and the gin did 55 lbs/day. The first one was relatively small and was operated by turning a crank - by hand. From the picture the first one looked like a big rectangular wooden box but not all that much bigger than an ice cream maker (or 2 - or 3).

The trouble for Eli Whitney was that he didn't get his patent enforced until over 10 years later (1807) so he lost a lot of money. He did better, a little later, when he invented a way of making a musket with interchangeable parts. Can't keep a creative person down!

I'd like to visit a factory and watch what happens to the cotton from pods to bolts of cloth.

Enough of my report of my ongoing curiosity about - just stuff.