416 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1957 



charged belt, to a receiving box. Others later tried to apply the same 

 principle, all without success, since an electrical charge proved 

 insufficient to pull the cotton from the boll. 



A different application of electricity was that of L. C. Stuckenborg 

 of Memphis, a diligent investigator who announced in 1922 that after 

 14 years of work he had successfully combined a vacuum machine with 

 a set of electrically operated brushes revolving inwardly at the end of 

 each suction tube. 8 The operation of the brushes was said to have 

 suggested itself to Stuckenborg one day when he observed a cow that 

 had broken into a cotton field adroitly extract the fiber with her horny 

 tongue in order to obtain the tasty oil seeds. His picking apparatus 

 was mounted on a gasoline tractor that provided power for eight 

 electric motors required to drive four sets of picking brushes and four 

 suction and cleaning fans. This rather elaborate machine was also 

 doomed to failure, since the electrically operated brushes added little 

 to its performance, and more especially because the machine had the 

 same disadvantage as other pneumatic machines — it did not result in 

 a sufficient saving of hand labor. Stuckenborg spent a good many 

 more years trying to simplify and improve his machine, to no avail. 



The idea occurred to a number of inventors, possibly suggested by 

 the successful harvester-thresher combines used in other crops, to 

 construct a machine that would cut the entire cotton stalk and separate 

 the lint from the rest of the plant by threshing action. Such a 

 machine would necessarily have to be rather large and complicated 

 in order to handle the massive bulk of the cotton plant along with the 

 lint. A machine of this type was patented in 1886, but its performance 

 was evidently not remarkable enough to record. In 1925 the Inter- 

 national Harvester Co. experimented with a machine patterned after 

 a grain separator. It was designed to pull the entire boll off the plant 

 and separate out the cotton. It was soon abandoned because it took 

 the mature and immature bolls indiscriminately and did not separate 

 the lint effectively. 



Proposals to utilize the entire cotton plant by some process of chem- 

 ical digestion, thus obviating the need to extract the lint from the boll, 

 were made recurrently. Robert R. Roberts, of Washington, D. C, 

 who pioneered in the development of delinted seed, in 1906 announced 

 that the cotton stalk could be pulped and made into paper. Since this 

 would have greatly reduced the value of the product, there was little 

 interest in the suggestion. 9 



Probably the most extensive experiments along this line were made 

 by Dr. Frank K. Cameron, of the University of North Carolina, who 



8 The successful cotton picker, Sci. Amer., vol. 126, p. 179, March 1922. 

 • Utilization of the entire cotton plant, Sci. Amer., vol. 95, p. 343, November 10, 

 1906. 



