422 annual report Smithsonian institution, 1957 



derous self-propelled picker and thus reduce its cost. The introduction 

 of the all-purpose tractor in 1925 spurred them to devise a trail-model 

 picker that could be attached to the tractor with a power-takeoff 

 arrangement and that would yet leave the tractor available for other 

 purposes on the farm. 



The company believed it was ready to introduce a trial machine on 

 a limited basis in 1929 and the parts for 20 such machines were already 

 completed when the financial collapse of that year abruptly altered 

 the economic outlook. In the succeeding years of deepening depres- 

 sion conditions became less and less propitious for the introduction of 

 a machine that would displace labor. Experimentation went on, but 

 as Clarence R. Hagen, chief development engineer, remarked, 



Considerable opposition to mechanical picking was encountered in the field. 

 Many cotton farmers were very skeptical, and sure that the cotton crop could 

 not be mechanized. At the end of every harvest season we returned with a 

 little more experience and a little more ridicule, for the average cotton grower 

 believed firmly in the eternal supremacy of the Negro cotton picker. 18 



Yet it was in the midst of these depression years, when the acreage- 

 reduction program had contributed its share of displaced farm workers 

 to the ranks of the already unemployed, that there appeared on the 

 scene a mechanical harvester which seemed to meet the requirements 

 for efficiency and labor saving that would enable it to compete suc- 

 cessfully with human labor at extremely low wages. This was the 

 cotton picker invented by John D. Rust and developed with the 

 assistance of his brother Mack. The advent of this machine is interest- 

 ing not only as a technical achievement but for the social dilemma it 

 posed. 



As children on a Texas cotton farm John and Mack Rust had picked 

 cotton on their knees and had often discussed the possibility of in- 

 venting a machine to ease this form of human drudgery. 17 John 

 Rust became an itinerant farm mechanic whose only formal training 

 in engineering came from a correspondence course. While working 

 for a combine manufacturer in Kansas City in 1924, he began to devise 

 the principal mechanical features of his spindle cotton picker. 



He was baffled, as many before had been, by the problem of removing 

 the cotton from a spindle that was sufficiently barbed or serrated to 



16 Hagen, Clarence R., Twenty-five years of cotton picker development, Agr. 

 Eng., vol. 32, p. 594, November 1951. 



17 For short biographical accounts of the Rust brothers, see Straus, op. cit, pp. 

 386-395; Rust, John, The origin and development of the cotton picker, West 

 Tennessee Hist. Soc. Pap., vol. 7, pp. 38-56, 1953 ; Mr. Little 01' Rust, Fortune, 

 vol. 46, pp. 150-152, December 1952; Weybright, Victor, Two men and their 

 machine, Surv. Graphic, vol. 25, pp. 432-433, July 1936. 



