The Growth of Cotton Fiber Science in the 

 United States 



By Arthur W. Palmer^ 



[With 8 plates] 



Little known to the world at large, there has taken place over the 

 last 50 years a development in science of substantial importance to 

 the people of the world who live by the production and distribution of 

 textile fibers and by their manufacture into the fabrics with which the 

 world is clothed. "\^Tiat in effect is a new science has evolved — a 

 science of textile fibers — combining the classic disciplines of physics, 

 chemistry, and biology with a liberal addition of mathematics, com- 

 plete now with a voluminous literature and professional societies of 

 its own, and lacking only a distinctive name of conventional Greek 

 derivation. From the microscopes, balances, test-tubes, and com- 

 puters of some hundreds of liighly trained research workers have 

 come bold new concepts of fiber structure and a systematic understand- 

 ing of the behavior of fibers in mass ; and parallel with these, a revolu- 

 tionary new technology that a huge industry has avidly embraced and 

 put to use in the day-by-day task of assaying the quality of the raw 

 materials with which it works. For both the science and the new tech- 

 niques have evolved in response to an intense need of the industry, of 

 the producer and merchant of the raw material, as well as of the maker 

 of cloth. 



Most spectacular, no doubt, of the results of these researches have 

 been those in the field of man-made fibers — in the improvement of the 

 earlier forms such as rayon and acetate fibers of dissolved and recon- 

 stituted cellulose, and in the later actual creation of a great niunber 

 of new chemical forms such as nylon, orlon, dacron, and vinyl, to 

 name but a few. But it is probably in the field of the natural fibers, 



^U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1920-54 (retired). Head, Cotton Division, Bureau 

 of Agricultural Economics, 1924-86; U.S. Agricultural Commissioner for Europe (Cotton), 

 1936-39 ; Head, Division of Foreign Crops and Markets, Office of Foreign Agricultural 

 Relations, 1939-42 ; Head, Cotton Division, OFAR, 1942-53 ; Director, Cotton Division, 

 Foreign Agricultural Service through 1954 ; Chairman, Interdepartmental Cotton Com- 

 mittee for the European Recovery Program (Marshall plan), 1947-48; General Secretary, 

 International Cotton Advisory Committee, 194ft-B4. 



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