Chance for Inventive Genius

1910

By Col. J. M. Mabry of Memphis

Many persons wonder why no shrewd inventor has ever yet devised a machine that will pick cotton.

Many an inventive genius has worked at this problem, but as yet it is unsolved. There is no trick in getting up a contrivance that will do the work of picking, but that does not begin to solve the difficulty. The trouble lies mainly in the fact that the cotton does not all mature and open at the same time. A machine that may pick out the locks of the opened bolls cleverly enough will also take along the green and unopened bolls and therefore destroy a big part of the crop. The human pickers will let the unripe cotton alone and return to the fields for it later, on maturity. Then again the machine will take up a lot of trash, dead leaves and pieces of stalk that will cause much trouble and labor to get rid of before the cotton can be carried to the gin.

It is a great pity that some better way of extracting the fleecy stuff cannot be found, but there is apparently nothing to do except continue the old plan of gathering the crop by hand. This is a slow and also an expensive procedure, as in a good year almost every planter raises more than he can gather with his own labor and is thereby forced to hire outside help. Occasionally it is impossible to get this help and as a result much of the cotton is left in the fields to be waited for want of labor to pick it.