Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/772

 Picking Cotton with a Vacuum Cleaner

This machine does the work better, quicker, and without the waste of hand pickers

��ACCORDING to Government fig- ures, hundreds of millions of dollars '" are yearly wasted by the careless picking of cotton. In some cases 50% of the crop is left on the plants. That ex- plains the two thou- sand patents for mechanical cotton pickers that have been taken out. Not one of the in- ventions disclosed has proved com- mercially success- ful. About a mil- lion persons are still engaged in the pick- ing, ginning, baling and transporting of the white fluffy stuff that goes to make up everything from gun "cotton to our "pure silk shirts" and other daily necessities.

As an article of commerce, cotton was almost negli- gible until Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. The American pro- duction of cotton, which was only two thousand bales in 1791, was instantly stimulated, with the result that in 1801 it had risen to nine- ty-two thousand bales. Since then, it has shown U constant increase, inter- rupted only by the Civil War, during which time, of course, but little cotton was grown in the states of the Con- federacy.

During the present war, cotton has come to the front as a very important factor in the actual winning of the war. Not only is it of importance in the textile industries, but more particularly in the manufacture of explosives.

Down in the new cotton country of the Imperial Valley, a reclaimed desert of Southern C'alifornia, there is now working a cotton picking machine that has already

���Showing the cotton-picking machine in oper- ation. Note the compactness of the cotton

��outclassed the hand pickers. What is more, the cotton it picks is even cleaner than that of the hand pickers' baskets.

The machine — called the Gabel-Holda- way — consists of a light steel chassis, sup- ported on three steel wheels for the sake of easy hand- ling. On the chas- sis supporting is a sixteen horsepower gas-engine, which drives a suction pump ^nd a centri- fugal separator. A light steel pipe runs across the machine,

���Five men, one at each nozzle, are all that are necessary to carry out the picking

��and from this run five eighteen-foot light rubber pipes, terminating in the peculiar picking nozzles, which the inventor claims are the reason for the success of the ma- chine, together with the centrifugal sep- arator.

Five men operate the nozzles, one to each. The pump sucks on the hose. The manipulator of the nozzle merely sweeps it across a row of bolls, and the white fluffy cot- ton is sucked into the nozzle and then through the pipe to the separator. Here the cotton is separated from the incidental leaves, and from the motes. Next the

��DELIVER.Y PIPE

��FUEL TANK

SUCTION PUMP AND CENTRIFUGAL SEPARATOR. SljKTTION PIPE HEADER

���LIGHT WEIGHT RUBBER SUaiON PES

��Diagram showing details of the cotton-pick- ing machine, which is not very complicated

��750

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