MECHANICAL COTTON PICKER.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3212, 6 May 1911, Page 4

MECHANICAL COTTON PICKER.

A WONDERFUL MACHINE

A machine which has recently been perfected may do for human libera- • tion more than could be accomplished by the laws of many States or the benefactions of many philanthropists. This is the mechanical cotton picker. The possibilities which lie latent in this bit of machinery are more credible when it is remembered what a social revolution was produced bi* another cotton machine—Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin. The cotton picker is the invention of a Scotsman, Angus Campbell. For twenty years he has been at work upon his idea, and has at last succeeded. The machine he has constructed will discriminate between ripe and unripe cotton, between leaves and cottton bolls, and will injure neither cotton nor plant. By means of it one man can do the work of fifty human pickers. What- this new invention can achieve for economy alone is astonishing. It is estimated that it will save in cost of picking cotton annually 180,000,0Q0d01. The great part of that benefit will be in making conditions of labor throughout the cotton region more humane and normal. The cotton that one mail can cultivate it requires ten persons to pick: and the longer the ripe cotton remains unpicked, the more danger it runs from wind and rain. So there is a sudden, frenzied, and then suddenly subsiding demand for labor. Children are pressed into service under the hot sun, and sometimes beaten for rebelling against the hard task; and negroes are charged with vagrancy so that the chain gangs will be replenished for the use of some of the big planters. If the cotton picking machine were in general use this spasmodic labor demand, with all its attendant evils, would disappear.