The cotton gin is a rather straightforward device. The machine was seldom necessary because harvesting cotton bolls needed easily accessible slave labor, which negated the necessity for the contraption. Cotton was still being hand harvested long into the 20th century. The cotton gin sped up the process of converting cotton fibers into filaments and automating the separation of the cotton seed from the cotton boll. The first cotton gins consisted mostly of a manual crank that turned a drum with wires sticking out of it. Imagine a hairbrush (or comb) or perhaps a curry comb on a revolving drum. The gathered cotton bolls were thrown into a hopper, where a rotating drum pulled the fibers together. The fibers were stretched out and made into a straight line during the pulling process. The cotton seed would be scraped off and saved for later use as these were further tugged and straightened. The strands would then pass through a second set of wires that were oriented at a 90-degree angle to the previous set. Soon after, there were more improvements and modifications, which led to a boom in the export of raw cotton (bales), as well as the beginning of the American apparel industry.
Although the gin made it easier to separate the seeds from the fibers, the cotton still required to be selected by hand. In the decade after Whitney's innovation, the demand for cotton typically quadrupled every ten years. As a result, cotton developed into a tremendously lucrative commodity that required an increasing amount of slave labor to harvest.
Eddie.