Whitney wouldn't know his cotton gin today
✍ Scribed by R.H.O.
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1939
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 57 KB
- Volume
- 228
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0016-0032
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Whitney Wouldn't Know His Cotton Gin Today.---One hundred and forty-five cotton crops have been harvested since Eli Whitney invented the gin. Improvements in the machine began almost immediately after Whitney demonstrated it, and new parts, new attachments, and new processes have been added frequently since. The modern gin differs as much from the original--which was no more complicated than a kitchen meat grinder--as the present-day rotary printing press from the old screw press. A recent Farmers' Bulletin, Modernizing Cotton Gins, put out by the United States Department of Agriculture, gives a good idea of what the gin has come to be in these days when the American cotton crop runs from 12 to I8 million bales. A real up-to-the-times gin has a drier to put green, damp, or wet cotton into proper condition for ginning. There are seed elevators and various ways have been devised to keep seed pure so farmers growing a certain variety can keep it free of contamination by other seed. Not all of the more than 12,ooo gins are modern, but hundreds of them have acquired the more recent improvements, including the seed cotton drier which, in the humid areas of the Cotton Belt, adds considerably to the value of the farmer's crop. R. H. O.