Word: cottons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...years before the cotton gin was invented the annual U. S. crop was 2,000,000 Ib. or 4,000 modern bales. Eight years after, the crop was 96,000 bales. By 1835 it was more than a million bales and by 1840 it had reached two million. For this sweeping upsurge the cotton gin could not take all the credit. Carding and spinning machines were developed, looms were fashioned better, railroad transport made its appearance. For 20 years the cotton crop has fluctuated around 15,000,000 bales, is now being held down to about 12,000,000 bales...
Meanwhile great strides were made in mechanical wheat harvesting. Threshers, reapers, combines, tractors replaced the man with the scythe and profoundly changed the economy of the grain-growing West. But today the cotton crop is harvested exactly as it was when Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin-by Negroes moving between the rows of plants, plucking the fluffy bolls by hand and stuffing them into huge bags which the pickers drag behind them. An average picker bags about 100 Ib. of seed cotton a day, for which, if he is hired by a plantation owner, he may, in good times...
...advent of a practical cotton-harvesting machine which would eliminate hand-picking would revolutionize the economic and social structure of the South. Reason for the nonappearance of such a cotton-picker is not sociological but technological. For 80 years men have tried to build a serviceable machine, and many a machine has been exhaustively tested. But the problem of taking in all or nearly all the ripe bolls without injuring green plants or gathering so much rubbish that ginning is impossible, seemed insuperable. International Harvester Co. is estimated (although it disclaims the figure) to have spent some...
...their harvester is a tunnel-like opening from front to back so that the machine straddles the row of plants. Into this opening a line of small, smooth, revolving rods project sideways. Carried on an endless belt, the rods first pass through a moistening device, then comb through the cotton plants. Because the rods are wet, the cotton sticks to them and winds itself around them. The adhering cotton is then mechanically stripped from the rods and passed into a hopper by suction. That is all. Planters who watched the Rust machine in action last season in Arkansas fields wondered...
...Brothers Rust were born on a Texas farm, orphaned in boyhood. They picked cotton. John swore that some day he would invent a cotton-picker to eliminate that back-breaking toil. He learned engineering and drafting from correspondence courses. Because he remembered that his grandmother moistened her spinning wheel to make cotton stick to it, the idea occurred to him to try a smooth, wet spindle on a mechanical picker. Soon he was joined by Brother Mack, who had graduated from the University of Texas and gone to work for General Electric Co. in Schenectady. Their first machines were tried...