Science: Cotton Sucker

To Waco (Tex.) Cotton Fair last week went a Connecticut Yankee, Charles J. Luce of Niantic, with a contraption which, like the contraption of another Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, helped the southern cotton grower.

The machine of Eli Whitney† was the cotton gin. Slender teeth mounted on a revolving cylinder, like the pins on a Swiss music box, pulled cotton through a series of narrow slots. Cotton seed could not pass through the slots; cotton fibres were effectively cleaned. Where a slave picked clean one pound of lint a day, Eli Whitney’s gin cleaned 50 pounds a day.

But the problem of mechanically picking cotton from bushes has not until very recently been solved. Humans, slaves until 1863, paid field laborers since, have picked cotton bolls by hand.

Then last month the International Harvester Co. announced sales of three effective machines: a cotton picker, a cotton boiler and a cotton cleaner (TIME, Sept. 19).

The Harvester machines are complicated. Inventor Luce’s device is simpler and accomplishes less work. But it is no less effective within its range. To demonstrate it at the Waco Cotton Fair, he hitched a mule to a two-wheeled wagon which bore the contraption, a pump that sucked air like a vacuum-cleaner through long flexible tubes. One man led the mule and cart between ripe cotton bushes. At each side of the mule walked a man with a tube from the vacuum pump strapped to a wrist. These men darted their hands at ripe cotton; the tubes with a soft hiss sucked the white bolls from brittle pods. A swift-handed picker can gather several hundred pounds of cotton daily with this device.

†Born 1765 at Westboro, Mass.; educated at Yale College; died 1825 at New Haven where he manufactured fire arms.