We have all seen the commercials, and we all know the
jingle. “The touch, the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives.” A pretty
common material today thanks to the invention of the Cotton Gin in the 1793 by
Eli Whitney, it wasn’t always cheap or available. Been cultivated for at least
the last 7,000 years it has helped shape cultures, save and ruin lives and cloth the backs of men.
In 3,000 B.C it was being cultivated in Pakistan and being
spun and woven into cloth. By 800 A.D. it was brought into Europe by Arab Merchants.
By the time of Columbus’s adventure to
the new World in 1492 where he found it on islands in the Bahama’s it was well
known through most of the world. The Industrial Revolution, the Cotton Gin and
sadly the building of the slave trade made the south the King of Cotton by the
1800s. It became more available to the masses, and came in a variety of colors and
eventually would be dyed with little flowers on them. Something that was extremely
expensive in the 1700s soon would become extremely cheap and the most common
cloth in a just a few years. Within 10 years it grew from a $150,000 industry
to $8 million.
This fluffy little seed is what everyone wanted, once
cleaned of the actual seeds the fluff, could be spun and woven. Between the
fact it is hard to clean it of the seed by hand, has a very short staple length
which makes it very hard to spin by hand and easy to break, which is probably
why it took so long to become the common cloth of the world. The cotton gin
made it easier to clean but back fired from making the slaves lives easier to
harder as the cotton industry to grew. That and the demand for cheap cloth, and
the mechanized world of the cloth industry made the south the King of Cotton.
 |
| Eli Whitney's cotton gin |
So the touch and the feel of cotton has come with its price.
Whether it is the expense of coin or the expense of man, history has made it a
lasting and renewable cloth. The world of natural fiber, older than anything we
can ever imagine.
