Word: picker
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Born in Alabama, but not superstitious, Jesse Owens is the son of a onetime cotton picker, now unemployed, who lives in Cleveland with his wife and eight other children. Total income of the Owens family is estimated at $7 a week. When Mrs. Owens applied for relief, she was refused on the ground that the family had enough money to send a son to college. At Ohio State, her son helps earn his way as a State House page. Christened James Cleveland Owens, he became Jesse when a teacher at Cleveland's Fairmount Junior High School to whom...
...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, receive as much as a dollar...
...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...
...last season in Arkansas fields wondered why it had not been invented before. It traveled down the rows leaving the open bolls stripped (see cut), the green bolls unharmed. It picked up no, rubbish. In seven and a half hours it gathered as much cotton as a diligent hand-picker gathers in an eleven-week season...
...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...