The Rust Cotton Picker

On 31 August 1936 Mack Rust demonstrated the mechanical cotton picker he and his brother John had built, on a private farm designated by the Delta Experiment Station at Stoneville, and several hundred planters, ginners, bankers, scientists and government men came to watch. John was not there; he was in the Soviet Union, delivering two of the ten machines the brothers had made. The insight behind it was his and it came from childhood. A spindle that grips cotton firmly enough to pull it from an open boll will not let go of it again, and Rust remembered how cotton had stuck to his fingers picking in the early morning dew, got out of bed, licked a nail, twirled it in a wad of absorbent cotton and found it would work. Smooth spindles, wetted with water, and the fibre stripped off cleanly afterwards. In an hour it picked four hundred pounds, about four days of hand work. It also knocked cotton to the ground, gathered leaf and stem that lowered the grade, and left between a quarter and a half of the crop standing on the first pass. The reviews were mixed and the alarm was not: this was the seventh year of the Depression, and the Jackson Daily News wrote that the machine should be driven right out of the cotton fields and sunk in the Mississippi river together with its plans. John Rust was a socialist who had stood for the Senate on the Communist ticket in Texas, and he meant to lease the machine only to growers who would pay a minimum wage and forgo child labour. What beat him was capital: bankrupt by 1940, and wartime steel went to International Harvester, whose barbed spindles and doffer took a whole crop at Hopson in 1944.