Nobody knows how long cotton has been in existence.
Three thousand years before the birth of Christ, the Egyptians in the Nile valley were already manufacturing and wearing cotton clothes. At about the same time cotton was also being grown in the valley of the Indus River in Pakistan, being handspun and woven into material by hand. The great philosophers Herodotus and Pliny both mentioned cotton in their writings. In 1793 a certain Eli Whitney, an American, patented the first ginning machine. After he had watched workers on a plantation in Georgia separating the fibre from the seed by hand, he built a machine which could do the same work 50 times faster.