Sanguine Tenacious Tidings

Inventive Humans

Quote:" I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today." Willie Nelson
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/cotton-quotes

Recomended Book:Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton. This book was made into a movie.

Fields of Music

Imagine what the world would be like today if humans had never discovered/invented the Cotton Gin._________

Eli Whitney brought the Cotton Gin into history in 1792. According to Wikipedia Cotton Gin means Cotton Engine. It's a machine that separates cotton fiber from the seeds. Seeds are used to make cotton seed oil and replant. The fiber is used to produce fabric. It is partly to blame for increased slavery because once the cotton fields became profitable more people were needed to pick the cotton. Also, considered a factor that helped bring about the civil war and freeing the plantation slaves.

Cotton picking machines were not actually available until after WWII. Two brothers John and Mack Rust worked on developing and patenting starting in 1935. The first ones were not readily available. After WWII, Allis Chalmers produced one built on an updated Rust pattern.

International Harvester also developed a pattern and built a cotton picking machine.

Reference: History of the Cotton Gin and the Cotton Picker can be found in Wikipedia.org.

From https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/q3om0/how_long_is_a_cotton_picking_m... we get this question:

How long is a cotton picking minute? Longer or shorter than a regular minute?

Feet2Big
3 points ·
8 years ago

"A cotton picker typically worked from sunup to sundown, as opposed to our regular 8 hour workday. I think that works out to an average of 65% longer. A cotton picking minute = 99 seconds."

The part of the cotton plant being picked is full of prickers. The workers hands were always filled with pricks as they worked all day in the hot sun.

Google:Picking cotton is back breaking work because you have to stay bent over at the waist dragging a sack behind you with 60 or 70 pounds of cotton in it all day. Those people that had weak backs had to crawl along the cotton rows on their knees because they couldn't stay bent over all day.Nov 4, 2001

The white master expected the slaves to pick two hundred pounds of cotton in a day work ten acres of land with only a ten-minute rest. Feeding the slaves undermined profits; therefore farmers gave them very little food to eat.