A machine that separates cotton fibers from seeds, seed hulls, and other tiny particles. Ginning mills vary in size from small hand-held units for home use to large horizontal spinning drums used by factories.
Cotton plants produce long fibers and short fibers. Most commercially grown cotton is a hybrid of these two types; it's called "upland cotton." Before the gin came along, farmers grew so much cotton they needed a lot of people working to pick it. They didn't have enough people to do this job easily or efficiently, so manufacturers invented machines to do the work for them. The first commercial gin was built by Isaac Benton in 1794. It was called the "Elliot Gin" after its inventor.
In addition to separating cotton fibers from seeds, modern gins also remove impurities such as dust from the cotton plant. This improves the quality of the yarn produced from the fibers.
There are three main types of gins: cylinder gins, frame gins, and egg beater gins. Cylinder gins have a conical chamber with openings at the tip and back where workers insert their hands to gather the cotton. They operate by forcing water through the cotton to release the seeds from the fiber.
Cotton "ginning" refers to the process of extracting fibers from cotton seeds. Seeds are removed from the cotton boll by hand or machine and processed into short lengths called "straw." Straw is then fed into a gin where it is compressed and spun into long threads called "yarn." These threads are used to make fabrics such as T-shirts, sheets, towels, and jeans.
Ginning reduces the seed's weight so that more can be harvested from each plant. The extraction of fiber from the seed is done using chemicals which destroy the protein structure within the seed causing the fiber to fall out when washed.
In North America, most cotton is ginningned before it is sold as raw cotton. Before the introduction of chemical pesticides and herbicides, farmers relied on birds for pollination. Because pollen is heavy and plants don't produce as much pollen when they're not open, farmers needed only about half as much cotton as they do today. This left more room for error and less need for industrial-scale farming. However, because cotton is vulnerable to pests and diseases, it must be protected with pesticides and herbicides.
Cotton plucked from the plants contains seeds. Ginning is the process of extracting cotton seeds from pods. Traditionally, ginning was done by hand. Machines are now utilized in ginning. Spinning refers to the process of creating yarn from fiber. Yarns were originally made from wool but now also made from cotton and other fibers.
In traditional gin operations, workers would walk through fields picking immature cotton flowers called buds. They would then take these buds to a shed where they would be placed in large bins called swathers. Workers would then use a swather to pull the buds off the sticks and deposit them into another bin called a pinner. The pinner would separate the seeds from the bud material. Finally, the seeds would be sent to a factory for processing into oil or fluffy cotton balls for sale at stores. This was a very labor-intensive process that not only damaged the seedlings but also produced large amounts of trash.
Modern commercial gins use machines instead of people. The machines go through the same fields as the traditional gin did but they pick and process the cotton. These machines can be more efficient and reduce the amount of trash created compared to the traditional method.
Gins fall into two main types: horizontal and vertical. In both types, the gin starts with the field being sprayed with water to keep it free of dust.
The cotton engine A cotton gin (also known as a "cotton engine") is a machine that swiftly and simply separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for far higher production than traditional cotton separation. Eli Whitney, an American inventor, invented and patented a modern mechanical cotton gin in 1793. The invention proved so effective that it greatly increased the demand for and consumption of cotton fabric during America's early industrial period.
Whitney's gin used two screws to turn cotton bolls open, which allowed the oil-rich seeds to be separated from the fiber. This technology eliminated the need for human hand-separation which had been done before his invention. The refined cotton could then be used for fabrics or burned for fuel. Cotton gins played an important role in the expansion of slavery by providing a labor-saving device that allowed slave owners to obtain more cotton per acre and thus increase their profits. Around 1820, improvements were made to the design of the cotton gin by people including James H. Allen and Richard Owen Ellis. These new models were much less complex than Whitney's original gin and they remain in use today in some parts of the world where electricity is not available.
In the United States, most cotton was processed using a variation on the Whitney machine. In 1872, John Harvey Kellogg invented the first successful automatic cotton gin.
Copyright © 2020 - 2023 BindleyHardware & Co Inc.
