414 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 7 



branching plant taller than a man's head. As many as 500 varieties 

 of American upland cotton have been grown in this country simul- 

 taneously, with great variation in plant conformation, hairiness of 

 leaf, tightness of boll, and other characteristics which seriously affect 

 the ease of harvesting. 



Much of the value of the fiber depends on its freedom from leaf 

 trash, staining by foliage sap, and tangling with weeds. This factor, 

 together with the waste entailed when the fully exposed fleece is readily 

 knocked to the ground, makes picking a delicate operation. Perhaps 

 the most troublesome aspect of the plant is that its bolls do not ripen 

 uniformly and the crop therefore cannot be gathered at once. Unripe 

 bolls are likely to be injured by any crude mechanical device used to 

 harvest the early crop. These were some of the technical factors with 

 which would-be inventors of successful cotton harvesters had to 

 contend. 



INVENTIONS TO HARVEST THE CROP 



Even under the conditions of slavery some efforts were made to 

 reduce the amount of hand labor in cotton production. As early as 

 1820 an imaginative Louisiana planter imported a cargo of Brazilian 

 monkeys with the hope of training them to pick cotton. 2 Had they 

 proved sufficiently adaptable it is conceivable that monkey breeding 

 might have replaced the slave trade and thus averted critical events 

 leading to the Civil War. 



The first recorded invention of a machine to harvest cotton was a 

 mule-drawn picker patented by Samuel S. Rembert and Jedediah 

 Prescott, of Memphis, in 1850. 3 This machine embraced two sets of 

 rotating cylinders and disks studded with teeth to comb the cotton 

 off the plants. Although it may be considered a simple prototype of 

 the modern spindle picker, it was too crude to do an effective job. 



By 1864 there were 12 patents in effect on a variety of manual or 

 mechanical picking aids, and in nearly every succeeding year at least 

 one patent has been granted for some type of harvesting device. 4 

 Over 1,800 patents had been granted on new or improved models by the 

 end of World War II, when a commercial market for these machines 

 first began to develop. Broadly grouped, these inventions have in- 



' Page, Arthur W., A cotton harvester at last, World's Work, vol. 21, pp. 13, 

 748-760, December 1910. This article is chiefly devoted to a description of Angus 

 Campbell's spindle picker, discussed below. 



8 Arts and manufactures, Rep. U. S. Commissioner of Patents for 1850, Pt. 1, 

 pp. 233-234. 



* See Watkins, J. L., King Cotton : A historical and statistical review, 1790- 

 1908, pp. 149, 175, 259, 1908, for descriptions of some of the earliest inventions. 



