jmcandrew sends these in: “I didn’t realize that Eli Whitney was someone 6 year olds were familiar with. Also there’s a pretty funny Bizarro comic.”
But why GIN? Per Wikipedia, “gin” was simply short for engine in the 1700s, “cotton gin” literally meant “cotton engine,” and that name stuck far better than a functional description like “cotton seed remover.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
Hearts full of youth
Hearts full of truth
Six parts gin
To one part vermouth
— Tom Lehrer, “Bright College Days”
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Cotton gin, for that very dry martini.
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“Engine” was apparently a prestigious/trendy thing in the time period, like “app” was in the 2010s.
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There is a remnant of that older broad usage in expressions like “They’re trying to gin up some enthusiasm for the reboot.”
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Carl, the comparison to “app” (short for application) is very apropos.
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Re gin up, there seems to be debate over whether it’s short for “engine” or for “ginger”, as in “ginger up”, the practice of applying ginger to a horse to make it appear lively (presumably upsetting SPCA and PETA in the process).
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I recall a local newspaper story several years back about a tiny farming community on the then-edge of the metro area that was on the cusp of suburban development (which has now largely surrounded/overwhelmed it). The town was basically built around a cotton gin, one of the largest in the area in its day, which was still operating at the time. The big city writer of the story interviewed a longtime local resident local resident, apparently asking her what exactly do folks do at a cotton gin. “They gin cotton.” was her incredulous response.
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The oversimplification of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin was also one of the inventions told by Schoolhouse Rock in “Mother Necessity”. So we’ve been trying to push that on 6-year-olds for quite some time.
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Always struck me that to “gin up” meant something on the order of to “generate” or some such.
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I’m with Swimming Man Burning.
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Very old joke:
Eli Whitney: “Mother, I’ve just invented the cotton gin!”
Mrs. Whitney: “That’s nice, dear. Pour me some.”
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Besides Schoolhouse Rock when I was in grade school we did a song or something about inventors, I can’t remember all the inventors, but remember Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, Howe and the sewing machine (though I heard a podcast explaining it was a bit more complicated then what they thought us) and Otis and the elevator.
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SMB: Always struck me that to “gin up” meant something on the order of to “generate” or some such.
Well yes — it sounds like you meant to be disagreeing, but that was in fact the intent of my example in comment (4). Maybe I didn’t work hard enough to convey that. “Management is still trying to gin up interest in next year’s retreat.” (Hmm, but I’m still stuck on interest as the most illustrative object phrase.)
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