COTTON FIBER SCIENCE — PALMER 479 



tions. Webb studied them all and then came up with his own design 

 of a fairly simple instrument, which he induced a commercial manu- 

 facturer of scientilic apparatus, Alfred Suter, to construct. The re- 

 sult was all that was hoped for; it did the work and did it right. 

 Webb was granted a patent on the invention, which he immediately 

 dedicated to public use ; and then, in the hope that it would help Suter 

 to sell the instriunent to others, insisted with characteristic generosity 

 that it be called the Suter- Webb Duplex Fiber Sorter. 



In the view of many of Webb's contemporaries, the Suter- Webb 

 Sorter was the key that opened the gateway to a whole vast field that 

 awaited exploration. Primarily it afforded means of visualizing and 

 evaluating the length, uniformity, and distribution of fiber lengths 

 present in the cotton mass. More than that, it permitted incisive 

 studies to be undertaken of the differential characteristics of the 

 longer, median, and shorter fibers in a single cotton. From this point 

 onward, microscopic and ultramicroscopic as well as physical and 

 chemical analysis took on new meaning; and it began to be possible 

 to trace more certainly the relationships of some of the properties of 

 the fibers through to the properties of the textile products. As the 

 late Thomas Kearney, famed for his introduction of Egyptian cottons 

 to Southwestern irrigated agriculture and for evolving the Pima va- 

 riety, was to write Webb in 1956 after reading a review of the progress 

 of cotton fiber science up to that time : 



You have every reason to be proud of your i)art in these investigations, which 

 have revolutionized all phases of the cotton industry from breeding to market- 

 ing. The Suter-Webb (I think it should be Webb-Suter) Sorter, alone, was an 

 amazing achievement. 



Subsequent inventions have made it possible to obtain similar re- 

 sults in shorter time, but for maximum precision, the Suter-Webb 

 Sorter remains to this day the ultimate instrument. 



Webb's staff also began to contribute important new ideas in research 

 tools and processes. Parallel with his own invention of the cotton fiber 

 length sorter came the development of a radically new method for 

 measuring the strength of cotton fibers in mass, involving the use of 

 a device invented by Dr. E. E. Chandler, which was to be known as 

 the Cliandler Strength-Tester. Similarly, a penetrating study of the 

 subtle and elusive variations of color in cotton was being carried 

 forward by Miss Dorothy Nickerson and this work, too, was bringing 

 forth new and advanced apparatus of highly ingenious and specialized 

 design for fine color identification and measurement. 



Mrs. Wanda K. Farr, an eminent cytologist, in an exploration 

 of the molecular structure of the cotton fiber-cell was simultaneously 

 applying advanced microscopic and radiographic techniques to the 

 study of widely varied types of cotton representing successive stages 



