Another device which added greatly to the manufacturing possibilities with reference to cotton was the invention by Eli Whitney in America of the cotton gin, a machine for stripping the cotton fiber from the seeds and technically called the “gin,” probably a contraction of the word engine. It performs its work through the operation of a series of revolving saws which come in contact with the cotton through openings sufficiently narrow to prevent the passing of the seeds but permitting the fibers torn therefrom to pass downward into a receptacle, while the seeds, freed from the fiber, pass through another opening and are subsequently utilized in the manufacture of oil; though this utilization of the seeds did not develop until long after the cotton gin had become an important factor in the cotton-manufacturing industries of the world.
Through the application of these machines--the spinning jenny, the 258 water frame, the spinning mule, and the cotton gin, driven by power generated by water or steam, and in more recent years applied, in some cases in the form of electricity--the cotton manufacturing of the world has been transferred from hand work to that of machines, and the world’s consumption of cotton today is many times as much as that of the period in which these machines were being perfected, while the quantity of cotton goods produced from a given amount of cotton is, through the refinement of machine processes, much greater than formerly. The quantity of cotton cloth produced at the present time through the development of machinery and the encouragement which its use has given to production of cotton and consumption of cotton goods multiplies many times that of the period in which the transformation from hand to machine production began, and has made cotton the leading textile material of the world.
True, other branches of the textile industry have also benefited by the application of machine methods of spinning and weaving similar to those above described; but no other important textile has seen such a remarkable growth under the stimulus of machine production as has cotton. Even as late as 1830 the cotton consumed by those sections of the world for which statistics are available only amounted to about 500 million pounds, against 8,500 million in 1907, while, as already indicated, a pound of cotton under present conditions of manufacture produces probably twice as much of a given line of manufactures as a century ago. When it is remembered that the population of the world has only doubled since 1830 and the consumption of cotton is 17 times as great as at that time, the relative growth of cotton consumption to population will be seen to have been very great.