The Spindle Cotton Picker: Wind the Lint Off the Boll

The thumbnail shows one spindle drum from above. The machine moves to the right, so the cotton plants (pale green), squeezed sideways into the row unit, move to the left past it. The drum (pale blue) carries rows of spindles (yellow); a cam — the ends of the arms following the pink track — turns them so they reach straight into the plants through the slots between the brown ribs, and wind on the lint. As the drum carries them round and away from the row, they pass the **doffer** (violet, with blue pads) that unwinds the lint off them, and then the **moistener** (red) that wets them again before they return to the plants. Each spindle also spins on its own axis, driven through gears in the drum, so the lint winds on as it touches the boll.

Chuck a smooth hardwood dowel, about 10 mm across, in a cordless drill on its lowest speed. Hold an open cotton boll in one hand and touch the turning dowel to the lint for two seconds, then pull back. Do it ten times with a **dry** dowel, weighing the lint wound on each time. Then mist the dowel with water from a spray bottle and do it ten times again. Then try stripping the wound lint off each by sliding a gloved hand along the dowel against its rotation — the job of the doffer. Record the grams per touch for dry and wet, and whether the lint comes off cleanly. Rust's finding was that the moist smooth spindle both takes the lint and gives it up; your numbers are the test. Keep the lint for the cotton gin blueprint.

**John Daniel Rust** filed for a moistened-spindle picker patent in **1928** and received his first patent in **1933**. With his brother **Mack Rust** he founded the Rust Cotton Picker Company in Memphis in 1935 and demonstrated the machine at Stoneville on **31 August 1936**. Its first version had serious faults, but it picked cotton, and the public demonstration drew national attention. Other manufacturers developed spindle pickers of their own, and machine picking spread through the American cotton belt after the Second World War. Modern spindles are barbed rather than smooth, but they are still moistened, and still stripped by doffers. **Honest limits.** Machine-picked cotton carries more leaf and trash than hand-picked, so gins added cleaning stages. The picker also removed the work of hundreds of thousands of hand pickers — a social upheaval the Rust brothers themselves worried about.