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Sunday 27 July 2014

Cotton

Cotton begun to be used and worn by the Ancient Egyptians in around 4000 BC.

Alexander the Great established cotton growing in Greece.

Cotton, which is called mian or mumian in Chinese, was first produced in China from an area now known as Yunnan, some time around 200 BC.


Raw cotton appeared in Italy about the middle of the 12th century. Traders from Genoa and Venice brought it from Antioch and Sicily and from the Orient by way of Alexandria. Weavers used it to make fustian, a coarse material combining cotton and linen.

By 1767  James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny. The machine called for considerable hand labor, however, and Hargreaves' jenny produced inferior yarn.

With the help of a clockmaker, Richard Arkwright constructed a spinning machine that produced a stronger yarn. He set up his spinning-frame in Preston in 1868. It was the first machine that could produce cotton thread of sufficient strength to be used as warp.

In 1777 Arkwright leased the Haarlem Mill in Wirksworth, Derbyshire where he installed the first steam engine to be used in a cotton mill.

Arkwright faced opposition on the grounds that his inventions reduced the need for labour, and in 1779 his large mill near Chorley was destroyed by a mob.

By 1785 about 30,000 people were employed in factories using Arkwright's patents.

Eli Whitney was granted a patent for the cotton gin on March 14, 1794. This made it easier to separate the fibers from the seeds, making it possible to clean 50 pounds of cotton a day, compared to a pound a day before Whitney’s invention.

The first cotton mill to combine all the processes for making cloth under one roof was built in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1814. This coupled with Eli Whitney’s innovation of the cotton gin made so much cotton cloth available that for the first time in history inexpensive, ready-to-wear clothing could be made for working-class people.

The cotton fiber is from the cotton plant’s seed pod The fiber is hollow in the center and, under a microscope looks like a twisted ribbon.

Thomas Edison’s first light bulb filament was made of cotton (1879).

Paper money is not made from wood pulp but from cotton. This means that it will not disintegrate as fast if it is put in the laundry.

The USA is the world's largest exporter of cotton. Its "cotton belt" is made up of 17 states.


The world currently has enough cotton stockpiled to make 127 billion t-shirts.

It can take 2,700 liters of water to produce the cotton needed to make a single T-shirt.

The Chinese government owns 40% of the world's stock of cotton.

Source Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc.

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