SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



but they open up a new phase in the competition of 

 cotton with the synthetics. 



At the new Textile School of the North Carolina State 

 College of Engineering, Director Malcolm Campbell 

 showed me a spool of ring-spun cotton yarn so fine 

 that two hundred miles weigh but a pound. That kind 

 of yarn has not been made in this country. 



"American textile mills," he said to me, "have never 

 made the finest of sheer cotton fabrics. They will after 

 the war. There's a revolution going *on in our Southern 

 cotton textile industry and many new goods will result 

 in upsetting our old ideas about cotton textiles. I can 

 conceive that a few years hence women may be boast- 

 ing that they are wearing sheer cotton undies, luxury 

 fabrics made out of cotton/' 



All this research is forging new weapons for the 

 cotton-synthetic war. At the same time, recognizing 

 that it will be hard to recover cotton's lost export 

 markets and not easy to raise domestic consumption, 

 another college professor has proposed as wild a self- 

 help scheme as Killough's cottonless cotton. He would 

 toss the entire cotton plant into a chemical vat. 



A dozen years ago an inquisitive chemistry student 

 at the University of North Carolina asked a leading 

 question, "How much cellulose is there in the cotton 

 stalk?" This set that professor thinking. Why not 

 harvest the whole cotton plant with a mowing machine, 



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