Science: Blow the Bugs Down

News about a machine to fight the dreaded boll weevil is spreading fast through the cotton country. The inventor is Alex R. Nisbet, 83, a spry, glittering-eyed, retired cotton planter who for the past few years has been tinkering around a machine shop in Plainview, Tex. The Department of Agriculture in Washington hao never heard of him, but farmers in his neighborhood have gathered that he proposes to blow the weevils off the cotton. Last week he was ready to talk.

Nisbet’s machine is designed not only to blow the bugs down but to bag them for good. A big fan hooked to the front of a tractor blows through a pair of pipes (one toward the cotton row on each side). The bugs blasted off the plants are caught in funnels and sacks also carried by the tractor. With this simple device Nisbet removes from a single acre of cotton hundreds of pounds of boll weevils, bollworms, hoppers, leaf worms and other insects. The machine works as well on potato plants as on cotton. Nisbet builds his blowers himself in his own shop, has already sold six to neighboring cotton farmers at $275 apiece. Said one who has used it: “One operation . . . did more good than three applications of poison.”