In 1794, the inventor of a new piece of technology, the cotton gin, was Eli Whitney. This new invention helped to separate cotton fiber from the cotton seeds. Normally, this process would take a long time to just get a small amount of fibers by hand, but Eli Whitney’s cotton gin helped speed up this process. The design of the cotton gin is a wooden box with two cylinders, one cylinder with teeth like a wire comb that pass through slits and comb out the fibers. However, the seeds are too large to pass through the slits and fall to the bottom of the box. A second cylinder catches the separated cotton fibers and they fall into another part of the box where the fibers are collected. The cotton gin is powered by a hand crank that spins gear wheels
