Science: Cotton Sucker

To Waco (Tex.) Cotton Fair last week went a Connecticut Yankee, Charles J. Luce of Niantic, with a contraption which, like the contraption of another Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, helped the southern cotton grower.

The machine of Eli Whitney† was the cotton gin. Slender teeth mounted on a revolving cylinder, like the pins on a Swiss music box, pulled cotton through a series of narrow slots. Cotton seed could not pass through the slots; cotton fibres were effectively cleaned. Where a slave picked clean one pound of lint a day, Eli Whitney's...

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