a brief history of cotton

Cotton clothing fragments found in India and Pakistan, estimated to be around 5,000 years old, suggest that people have been using cotton to make clothes for a long time.

It is believed that Arab merchants introduced cotton cloth to Europe around 800 AD. By 1500 AD cotton was generally known throughout the world.

Cotton has been grown, harvested, ginned, spun and woven by hand for thousands of years. Machines invented during the Industrial Revolution greatly increased the speed and scale of cotton production – in particular, the water-powered spinning machine and the cotton gin.

The cotton gin, first patented in 1793 by Eli Whitney, was a hand-cranked device that stripped cotton fibre from the seeds. It allowed a worker to clean fifty pounds of cotton a day instead of one.

The world uses more cotton today than any other fibre. It has hundreds of uses and all parts of the cotton plant are useful. Once the fibre has been stripped to make cloth, linters (the short fuzz on the seed) is made into plastics and other products, the cottonseed is separated into oil for cooking, and meal and hulls for animal feed and fertiliser, and the stalks and leaves are ploughed to enrich the soil.

(Source: National Cotton Council of America and Cotton Counts)