The first practical cotton picker was invented over a period of years beginning in the late 1920s by John Daniel Rust (1892–1954) with the later help of his brother Mack Rust.
Cotton picking was originally done by hand. In many societies, like America, slave and serf labor was utilized to pick the cotton, increasing the plantation owner's profit margins (See Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade ).
There are other inventors who had attempted to create mechanical cotton pickers of their own, using barbed spindles that twisted the fibers onto the spindle, pulling the cotton off the boll as a result. However, those designs were often not functional, and were impractical due to how easily the spindles would get clogged up with cotton.
However, during the Great Depression it was difficult to obtain financing to develop their inventions. In 1935 the Rust brothers founded the Rust Cotton Picker Company in Memphis, Tennessee, and on August 31, 1936 demonstrated the Rust picker at the Delta Experiment Station in Stoneville, Mississippi.
Inventions and Inventors. In 1850 Samuel S. Rembert and Jedediah Prescott of Memphis, Tennessee, received the first patent for a cotton harvester from the U.S. Patent Office, but it was almost a century later that a mechanical picker was commercially produced.
Eli WhitneyCotton gin / InventorWhile Eli Whitney is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin, he was also the father of the mass production method. In 1798, he figured out how to manufacture muskets by machine so that the parts were interchangeable. It was as a manufacturer of muskets that Whitney finally became rich. He died in 1825.
Eli Whitney, who is credited for patenting the cotton gin machine on this day in 1794, became a topic of discussion at the top of this year's Black History Month. Although the farmer and inventor was depicted as a Black man to some students, in fact, Whitney was a white man.
John Daniel RustThe first practical cotton picker was invented over a period of years beginning in the late 1920s by John Daniel Rust (1892–1954) with the later help of his brother Mack Rust.
Benjamin Montgomery, born into slavery in 1819, invented a steamboat propeller designed for shallow waters. This was a valuable invention as it facilitated the delivery of food and critical items. As per Johnson, “Montgomery tried to apply for a patent. The application was rejected due to his status as a slave.
the Bessemer converterHenry Bessemer, in full Sir Henry Bessemer, (born January 19, 1813, Charlton, Hertfordshire, England—died March 15, 1898, London), inventor and engineer who developed the first process for manufacturing steel inexpensively (1856), leading to the development of the Bessemer converter.
Sumer or Sumeria is still thought to be the birthplace of slavery, which grew out of Sumer into Greece and other parts of ancient Mesopotamia. The Ancient East, specifically China and India, didn't adopt the practice of slavery until much later, as late as the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC.
According to the University of Houston's College of Engineering, Whitney got the idea from a slave known to history only as Sam. Sam's father came up with a kind of comb to get the seeds out of a cotton boll. Whitney heard about the idea and simply mechanized it. The gin made the mass cultivation of cotton profitable.
Thomas L. JenningsMost historians agree that Thomas L. Jennings is the first African American patent holder in the United States. Jennings invented a way to dry-clean clothes in 1821.
OLATHE, Kan. (Aug. 2, 2021) – John Deere has introduced two new cotton harvesters – the CP770 Cotton Picker and CS770 Stripper. These machines can help farmers harvest every pound of seed cotton possible while preserving cotton quality from the field to the gin floor.
From a historical perspective, cotton was originally picked by the hands of slaves living on plantations and the owner's profit margins were very good due to the over 400 years of free labor.
Beginning in 1800, slaves cultivated cotton for sixty years; but free blacks were cotton laborers for nearly a hundred years after emancipation.
For this reason, cotton plays such an important role in global commerce, and thanks to the advances in technology in the past 80 years, more and more people can enjoy cotton’s benefits globally with minimal disadvantage to sectors of society. Unlike any other time in the history of cotton (and textile production in history which, ...
Cotton is one of the few crops that can be historically found in both the Old and New World. In the ancient Greek and Roman Empire, cotton was largely unknown until the wars of Alexander the Great, where trees had been found “growing wool” from which the native cultures of areas such as India had already been harvesting and spinning cotton into clothes. On the other side of the globe, cotton picking and spinning were already known to Central and South American cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, who reported that people in Mexico and Peru were already wearing clothes made from cotton. In fact, examples of cotton items can be found dated to 3,000 BC. In China, examples of cotton clothing existed as far back as the Han Dynasty (200 BC-200 AD) and in Persia cotton fields were well-known for their harvests.