Back Aa

Birds and All Nature, Vol. VII, No 1, January 1900

<h2>COTTON FABRICS.</h2> W. E. WATT, A.M. IT is a remarkable thing in the history of the United States that, when the iron shackles were about to fall from the bondman, he was caught by a cotton fiber and held for nearly a century longer. We were about to emancipate the slaves a century ago when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, multiplied cotton production by two hundred, and made slavery profitable throughout the South. The South Carolina legislature gave Whitney $50,000 and cotton became king and controlled our commerce and politics. Eight bags of cotton went out of Charleston for Liverpool in 1784. Now about six million bales go annually, and we keep three million bales for our own use. So two-thirds of our cotton goes to England. The cotton we ship sells for more than all our flour. Cotton is still king. In our civil war we came very near being thrown into conflict with England by an entanglement of the same fiber which caught the black man. One of the greatest industries of England in 1861-5 was cotton manufacture, and when we, by our blockade system, closed the southern ports so cotton could not be carried out, we nearly shut down all the works in that country where cotton was made up. That meant hard times to many towns and suffering to many families. That is why so many Englishmen said we ought to be satisfied to cut our country in two and let the people of the Confederacy have their way. Cotton is a world-wide product. It grows in all warm countries everywhere, sometimes as a tree and sometimes as a shrub. It is usually spoken of as a plant. There was cotton grown in Chicago last year. Not in a hot house, but in a back yard with very little attention. A little girl got some seed, planted it, and had some fine bolls in the fall. It is a pretty plant, and was cultivated in China nearly a thousand years ago as a garden plant. Herodotus tells us that the clothing worn by the men in Xerxes' army was made of cotton. Their cotton goods attracted wide attention wherever they marched. Columbus found the natives of the West Indies clothed in cotton. Cotton goods is not only wide spread, but very ancient. Cloth was made from this plant in China twenty-one hundred years ago. At the coronation of the emperor, 502 A.D., the robe of state which he wore was made of cotton, and all China wondered at the glory of his apparel. More capital is used and more labor employed in the manufacture and distribution of cotton than of any other manufactured product. There is one industry in Chicago which out-ranks cotton. It is the live-stock business. More money is spent for meat and live-stock products than for cotton, taking the whole country together. But cotton ranks first as a manufacture. We spend more for meat than for cotton goods, and more for cotton goods than for wheat and flour. The hog and cotton seed have a peculiar commercial relation to each other. The oils produced from them are so nearly alike that lard makers use cotton seed oil to cheapen their output. A large part of what is sold as pure leaf lard comes from the cotton plant. A hundred years ago a good spinner used to make four miles of thread in a day. This was cut into eight skeins. Now one man can do the work of a thousand spinners because of machinery. One gin does to-day what it took a thousand workers to do then. Five men are employed in the running of one gin, so the gin alone makes one man equal to two hundred. Because one workman cleans two hundred times as much cotton since Whitney's time as before, cotton-raising has become a broad industry. The reason more cotton was not raised in the olden times is that it could not be used. Now we can use as much cotton as we can possibly raise. At first there was strong opposition to these improvements in machinery [Pg 6] because the workmen felt their occupation would be taken away. But the cotton workers are to be congratulated, for there are four times as many men working in the cotton industries as there were a hundred years ago, and yarn thread is produced at less than one-tenth the cost while the workmen are all better paid for their labor. James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1767. He was an illiterate man, and yet his machinery has not been materially improved upon. The poor fellow was mobbed by the infuriated workmen who saw that their labor was apparently to be taken from them by machinery. He was nearly killed. He sold out his invention and died in poverty. He received nothing from the government nor from the business world for his great invention. But after his death his daughter received a bounty. Two years after the jenny, in 1769, Richard Arkwright invented the spinning frame. He was a barber by trade, but through the appreciation of crazy old George III., he was struck upon the shoulder with a sword and rose Sir Richard Arkwright. He amassed a great fortune from his invention. His spinning frame and Hargreaves' spinning jenny each needed the other to perfect its work. The jenny made yarn which was not smooth and hard. So it was used only for woof, and could not be stretched for warping. The result of the two inventions was a strong, even thread which was better for all purposes than any which had been made before. Parliament imposed a fine of $2,500 for sending American cotton cloth to England, and another for exporting machinery to America. Massachusetts at once gave a bonus of $2,500, and afterwards $10,000 to encourage the introduction of cotton machinery. Francis Cabot Lowell was an American inventor. He brought the business of weaving cotton cloth to this country. There had been some small attempts before his time, but he introduced it extensively and profitably. He established a cotton factory in Massachusetts in 1810, and was very successful. In that year he was in England, dealing with makers of cotton goods. The idea occurred to him that it would be more profitable to make the goods on his side of the water where the cotton was raised. He acted promptly. Lowell, Massachusetts, is named after him, and stands as a monument to his good judgment and inventive genius. Three years after he had established the manufacture of cotton goods in this country, he invented the famous power loom. That was a great step in advance. It has done more for the industry than anything since the days of Hargreaves and Arkwright. By the use of power these looms set the spindles running at a remarkable rate of speed. Twenty years ago the world wondered at the velocity of our spindles, 5,000 revolutions in one minute. But it has kept on wondering ever since, and the speed of spindles has constantly increased as if there could be no limit. 15,000 revolutions are now common. In Great Britain there are 45,000,000 spindles running at a wondrous rate, and 17,000,000 are running in America. With cheaper labor and more extended experience, they are doing more of it across the water than we. For our consumption we make all the coarse grades, but all the fine cottons are imported. They get large quantities of cotton now in India. Egypt also is a great cotton country, producing the best cotton grown with the one exception of our famous sea island cotton. Her crop is worth $48,000,000 annually. England has hunted the world over for cotton and good cotton ground, and while we were engaged in war she was increasing her endeavors in this direction with much earnestness. If you will notice the contents of a boll of cotton you will be surprised to find that the fiber is not the main thing there. The seed is far heavier than the fiber, and it really occupies more space when the two are crowded into their closest possible limits. You can press the cotton down upon the seed till the whole is but little larger than the seed. The fiber clings to the seed with great firmness, and you find it difficult to tear them from each other. There [Pg 7] is no wonder it was such a slow process to separate them in the good old days. The Yankee, Eli Whitney, went to Georgia to teach school, but by the time he arrived there the school was taken by another, and he was out of employment. That was a happy misfortune for him and for the country. He was a nailer, a cane maker, and a worker in wood and metal. A Yankee nailer cannot be idle in a strange land. The expression, "as busy as a nailer," is a good one. Whitney looked about him to see what was the popular demand in his line. He found the greatest difficulty the southern people had to contend with was the separating of cotton from its seed. He went at the business of inventing a machine to do the work for them. He placed a saw in a slit in a table so that cotton could be pushed against its teeth as it revolved. The teeth caught into the fiber and pulled it away from the seeds. As the seeds were too large to pass through the slit in the table they flew away as the fiber let go its hold upon them, and Whitney soon found he had solved the problem. This is the first step in what may be called the manufacture of cotton fabrics. In another article we shall examine all the various sorts of textiles that are made from this interesting fiber, and speak of their manufacture, treatment, sale, and use. Under Whitney's gin the bulky seeds soon began to pile up astonishingly, and it became customary to remove the gins as the piles of this useless seed accumulated. It was left to rot upon the ground in these heaps just as it fell from the gin. Another ingenious Yankee saw there was a great deal of material going to waste in these piles, and he experimented to see what could be done with the seed. It was found to be very good for use on ground that had become poor by exhaustive farming. An excellent fertilizer is made from it. The cake is used for feed for cattle to great advantage. Dairymen regulate the quality and color of the milk they get from their cows by varying the amount of oil cake given in their food. The oil extracted from this seed is used in the arts. It is not equal to linseed oil for painters' use, but it is a great substance for use in mixing in with better oils to make them go farther. In other words, it is largely used for the purposes of adulterating other oils. Not only is it used in making lard, but it is now sold on its own merits for cooking purposes. Two days out of New York we sighted the black smoke of a great steamer. At sea everybody is on the lookout for vessels and much interested in the passengers that may be on the craft casually met. So we kept watch of the horizon and were glad to see that a big one was coming our way. She was headed so nearly towards us that we hoped to get a good view of the many passengers that might be expected on so large a ship. When she was near enough to show some of her side, she looked rusty and ill kept. We wondered what the fare must be for a ride across the water on such a cheap-looking monster. As she came nearer we saw there were no passengers. "What is she?" "What does she carry?" The first mate told us she was a tank steamer, running between the United States and Belgium, carrying 4,200 tons of cotton-seed oil at a trip. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.