Cotton is a plant, it grows wild in many places on the earth, but it has been known about, cultivated and

put to use by people of many lands for centuries. Scientists and historians have found shreds of cloth or written reference to cotton dating back at least seven-thousand years. The oldest discovery was made in a Mexican cave, where scientists unearthed bits and pieces of cotton bolls and cloth. Archaeologists have also found cloth fragments in the Indus Valley of India (Pakistan) dating about 3000 B.C. In 1500 B.C.,

Cotton Trivia
White Gold is a historical and appropriate term for cotton, the natural fiber which continues to play an important role in the United States economy.

cotton was referred to in a Hindu Rig-Veda hymn mentioning "threads in the loom." It is generally believed that the first cultivation of cotton was in India, though it grew wild in several locations around the world. People living in Egypt's Nile Valley and across the world in Peru were also familiar with cotton. Cotton was grown by American Indians in the early 1500's, documented from sightings by the Coronado expedition 154042. The Spaniards raised a cotton crop in Florida in 1556.

In England, in the early 1700's, during the height of the British Empire, it was against the law, to either import or manufacture cloth from cotton. These laws were enacted to protect the powerful English sheep and wool industry of that time. These restrictions also kept the cotton industry from expanding to the American Colonies. However, by the early 1600's, cotton had been introduced to North America and in 1607 the first seed was planted by colonists along the James River in Virginia. The colonists had the ability to produce much cotton but were restricted by the mechanical know-how. It was Samuel Slater, an English mill worker, who changed this by migrating to America in 1790 and building the first American cotton mill from memory. With the development of the cotton mill, Eli Whitney saw the need for a faster means of removing the lint (cotton fibers) from the seed. In 1793, he patented a machine known as the cotton gin. This invention revolutionized the way lint was separated from the seed. Up to that time, for centuries, the separation process had all been done by hand. With Whitney's gin, short for the word engine, lint volume was increased for each worker from 1 lb. To 50 lbs. per day. Harvesting the cotton by hand was another limitation of productivity. An experienced laborer could pick approximately 450 pounds of seed cotton (cotton removed from the plant with seeds intact) by hand per day. A picking device was first patented in 1850 and a stripper (a machine that strips both open and unopened bolls and trash from the plant) in 1871. In the early 1930's, after years of development and change, the Rust Brothers of Mississippi used a one row mechanical cotton picker (a machine that used revolving spindles or barbed points to grab and pull the cotton from the open boll) of their design to pick approximately 8,000 pounds of seed cotton in one day. This was quite an improvement in cotton harvest efficiency

Surgical cotton history

Kimberly, Clark and Co. was founded in 1872 by John A. Kimberly, Havilah Babcock, Charles B. Clark, and [3] Franklyn C. Shattuck in Neenah, Wisconsin with US$30,000 capitalization. The group's first business was operating paper mills, which the collective expanded throughout the following decades. In 1914 the company developed cellu-cotton, a cotton substitute used by the United States Army as surgical cotton during World War [citation needed] I. Army nurses used cellu-cotton pads as disposable sanitary napkins, and six years later the company introduced Kotex, the first disposable handkerchief, followed in 1924. New one
[contradictory]

disposable feminine hygiene product. Kleenex, a

The need for sterile bandages in medicine precipitated the design of mass-producible, absorbent materials. In 1886, the medical supply company Johnson & Johnson developed surgical wound dressings made of heated, sterilized absorbent cotton with a gauze overlay to prevent fibers sticking to wounds. This design for sterile wound dressing became a fixed part of medical treatment, although it was still unavailable to the general public. However, as women changed their clothing styles and became more independent, demand increased for transportable absorbent menstrual napkins, as well as disposable diapers. In 1887 an American, Maria Allen, created a cotton textile diaper covered with a perforated layer of paper, to draw blood away from the skin, with a gauze layer stitched around it. It was an improvement over the usual washable cotton rag that was extremely leaky (as both a sanitary napkin and a diaper). However, it was too expensive for mass production. Johnson & Johnson continued to improve on the absorption capacity of their original bandage. They discovered that heating and compressing several layers of cotton together provided higher absorption, less leakage, and less bulk in their dressings. When the Lister Towel, as it was named, became widespread in 1896, menstrual products such as the Germanmanufactured Hartmans Pads and bolts of sanitary cotton cloth appeared in catalogs for women. However, the Johnson & Johnson product was expensive. Cotton, while readily available, still had to be hand picked, processed and sterilized. So, in 1915, an American paper supply company called KimberlyClark developed Cellucotton, a bandage material that combined sterile cotton with wood pulp-derived cellulose. During World War I, nurses working in Europe began to use both the Lister Towel and Cellucotton as menstrual pads. By 1921, propelled by this innovative application, Kimberly-Clark manufactured Cellucotton-based disposable pads called Kotex. Thick, with a gauze overlay, they employed several different securing devices. Used in diapers, Cellucotton was sometimes covered by a thick rubber pant, which inhibited evaporation and could exacerbate diaper rash and urinary tract infections in babies. Breathability would become one of the challenges in the decades to come. Read more: http://socyberty.com/history/absorbent-materials/#ixzz1tVR4Kedw