NATURE'S WONDER FIBER

Heat. Heat. [Music] When loveliness goes hand in hand with usefulness, people everywhere acclaim the result. All over the world, they praise it in the language of their land. If the language is English, it's beautiful. And just as important, it will stay beautiful. That's cotton. Or if the words are Italian [Music] [Music] and still another cause for praise, this time in German. [Music] and wherever Spanish is spoken. [Music] in Japan with its ancient reverence for beauty. [Music] [Music] and a fashion designer in Paris. [Music] They speak in many tongues and they praise many qualities. Yet they all speak of the same thing of cotton. How lovely and useful it is. Beauty and utility bred into the living fiber by nature herself. By nature working with her incomparable tools, the sun and the air. the soil, the rains and the wonder of growth. From the wedlock of seed and soil, the cotton plant is born. It stretches upward for light and air. Roots downward into the good earth. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] This is cotton, the living plant. Out of the wonder of growth comes nature's wonder fiber. Cotton servant of mankind for as long as men can remember. Its beginnings veiled in antiquity. Its story older than history itself. We do know that in India cotton has been grown and used for at least 5,000 years. Centuries later, the Arabs carried it westward over the trade routes from the Orient. Their word coutun gave us our word cotton. During the Middle Ages, many Europeans believe that cotton was a vegetable lamb that grew on trees. In fact, the German word for cotton, balva, means tree wool. In 1493, when Columbus returned to Spain from discovering America, among the treasured gifts he brought to Queen Isabella were gold and a sce of cotton thread. By the 18th century, spinning and weaving cotton and making it into articles of beauty and comfort was a worldwide enterprise. Then, as the 18th century drew to a close, cotton sparked the industrial revolution. And ever since it has been a force shaping history. [Applause] Today, cotton is one of the world's great industries, and the world depends mightily on it to help stabilize the economy of nations. [Music] Why has this fiber been such a powerful force across the centuries? What has made cotton so vastly more important than any other fiber? What is this wonderful fiber which nature has given us? If you take a cotton bowl apart, you find it's made up of several clusters called locks. Each lock contains seven to 10 seeds. From each seed grow thousands of fine, strong, resilient hairs, the cotton fibers. Each fiber is born from a cell in the seed wall. One fiber from each of the thousands of cells. The growing fiber is a hollow tube. It is filled with protoplasm, the substance of life. When the tube is grown to its full length, nature begins to transform the protoplasm into layers of cellulose. A new layer each day until 20 to 30 layers have been formed. Each of these layers consists of minute fibbrids arranged spirally. This complex structure which only nature can produce makes cotton the wonder fiber it is gives the fiber its unique combination of strength, flexibility and absorbency. Finally, as the bowl ripens, the fiber dries. In drying, it flattens and twists, assuming a shape ideal for spinning into yarns. In all of nature, there is no other fiber like this. Nor has man ever been able to copy it. But man has learned to work with nature in a partnership which produces still better plants, better fibers. Cotton, unlike artificial fibers, can be improved through the science of plant breeding. Scientists help nature create better varieties by crossing selected strains of wild cotton with the best cultivated strains from all over the world. The scientist uses painstaking techniques to pollinate the cotton flowers with the pollen of the selected variety and then to protect the fertilized plants against the bees and other insects which nature uses to propagate her strains. [Music] Crossing and recrossing year after year, scientists achieve new, better combinations of fiber properties. They can breed into cotton a wide range of properties such as the ability to bloom early before destructive pests arrive or greater yield or greater length, strength, and finness of fiber. And when the seed is made ready for the soil, they ride with the farmer still other scientists, agricultural experts and equipment engineers who help him find the best ways to plant the seed, prepare the soil, nurture the plant, and nature responds. [Music] But weeds compete with the young plants for food and water. And man intervenes. Cultivating the fields. The farmer tears out the weeds and loosens the soil to airrate it so that oxygen will reach the young roots. And again, nature responds. But insects attack. The bull weevil, for instance, feeds on cotton and would destroy the crop if the farmer did not fight back. Then to prepare for the harvest, the farmer sprays the plants with a chemical which withers the leaves. [Music] As the dead leaves fall off, the bowls are exposed to sunlight and air. They dry out faster, open more rapidly and evenly. They are healthier bowls and better prepared for harvesting. And then the harvest. [Music] As we know the cotton bowl consists of seed clusters and the fibers are part of the seed. Fibers and seed must be separated from each other. To do this, the cotton is taken from the fields to the gin. It is fed into jinning machines in which the teeth of revolving saws grip the fibers and pull them from the seed. Fibers and seed go their different ways. The seed rich in nutritious oils and proteins is processed for use in food and animal feed products. The fibers are bailed and go to market. Distributing raw cotton in response to the worldwide demand is an extraordinary undertaking. It is the job of the cotton merchant. In his far-reaching role, he must know the cotton fiber is in the merchant's classing room. Samples from every bail are classified with exacting care. Color accurate eyes appraise the fibers whiteness and cleanliness. Sensitive fingers evaluate its finness and length. To these human judgments acquired from years of experience are added the measurements of sensitive machines. Fiber finness can be determined by measuring the fibers resistance to air. The strength of the fiber is tested on another machine. Knowing the precise characteristics of the fibers in each bail enables the merchant to fill orders to the particular specifications of his customers with their greatly varied requirements. It is the merchant who channels the bales out along the tradeways of the world to be made into textiles serving the thousand1 vital uses for which the cotton fiber is better suited than any other. And now the bales arrive at the mill. Here the spinner will process the fibers and spin them into yarn. The spinner buys different kinds of cotton, often grown in different parts of the country. He combines these in careful proportions to give desired properties to the finished yarn. The cotton has been compressed in the bail. And as these machines mix the fibers, they also fluff them out. The mixed and loosened fibers are then further fluffed and any bits of foreign matter removed. The clean fibers come off the machines in big rolls, looking much like the absorbent cotton you buy at the drugstore. But the millions of fibers are still a tangled mess. They must be separated and aligned. Then they are formed into a ropelike strand. Often the strands formed into rolls are put through combing machines. Combed cotton means that the very short fibers have been taken out resulting in a stronger, more uniform yarn. Now several strands of fibers are combined. The combined strands are fed into a series of rollers. They are twisted slightly to make them stronger, drawn finer, and wound on bobbins. The bobbins are taken to the spinning frames, and the fibers are spun into yarn. [Music] It almost seems that nature must have intended cotton to take color. Cotton dyes more easily, more evenly, and with faster colors than any other textile. The dye penetrates to the core of the yarn. The color becomes part of its very fiber. And now the yarns are made ready for weaving into fabric. Preparing the yarns for the loom and the art of weaving itself are among man's oldest art crafts. In today's cotton mills, the ancient arts are wedded to modern machines, to modern methods, and the marriage is a happy one. What the textile artist conceives, the weaving technician translates, and the loom produces the reality. [Music] Weaving is not the only way to achieve designs and patterns. They can also be printed on a fabric. The most common printing method uses rollers, and there are several techniques for transferring the artist's design onto the roller. Here, as the design is traced, the machine engraves it. From rollers like this, colorful designs and patterns are printed on the fabric, much as fine printing is done on paper [Music] or cotton fabrics may be dyed in solid colors. the lovely permanent colors cotton takes so well. Many cotton fabrics are intended to be used without color. Such fabrics woven with undyed fibers are bleached to make them snowy white. In addition to such basic finishing as printing or bleaching, cotton fabrics may be finished in a 100 other ways by a 100 different methods in response to hundreds of consumer demands. A fabric may be glazed or polished, napped or crinkled. High shrink resistance is a must and the finisher achieves it. Cotton fabrics can be treated chemically to make them even more useful, more attractive. They can be made flameroof or mildew resistant or antiseptic. In fact, they can be given an almost limitless range of desirable properties. Cotton also is knitted into fabric. Knitted cotton fabrics are widely used for underwear as well as outerwear. [Music] They range from loose openloop constructions to fabrics so closely knitted it seems to be woven. Yes. Spinner, weaver, knitter, finisher, all link their skills to bring forth a virtually unlimited choice of cotton fabrics. The list is still long. Fabrics with names derived from many tongues. Heritage from the artcrafts of many peoples. All made from this fiber. source of the splendid qualities found together only in a cotton fabric. Cotton is strong and durable. That's why mothers everywhere say gracias. Thank goodness for cotton. What mothers know science can prove. Abrasion tests in the laboratory show that cotton is the only fiber to combine high wear resistance with absorbency and comfort. Cotton fabrics won't pucker and fray and seams stay tight. This tensil testing apparatus shows that cotton can take a load of 100,000 lb per square in. How strong is that? Well, it's about as strong as the structural steel used for the skeletons of our modern skyscrapers. When cotton gets wet, it gets still stronger. It thrives on soaking and doesn't mind perspiration. When the wet cotton is tested for its tensil strength, it is found to be as much as 25% stronger than when dry. Yes, cotton's love for water is another reason women love cotton. It's still lovely, and yet she's washed it and washed it. With its high wet strength, cotton has always been able to withstand the rigors of the laundry tub and come through the ringer smiling. Today's cotton take the agitations and tumblings of the automatic washing machine in stride. They won't stretch and don't shrink. And cotton takes dyes that will stay true even in the hottest water. As every housewife knows, it can take a high heat without scorching, and it never glazes or melts under the heat of the iron. And cotton is comfortable. It does feel good against the skin. Cotton has a soft, gentle touch, highly absorbent, it is never cold and clammy in cold weather and in hot weather. Fresco. In hot weather, it's always light, crisp, and cool. All over the world, people prize the many useful qualities with which nature has endowed the cotton fiber. And these natural advantages are not all. For the textile chemist has learned how to treat the fiber itself with remarkable chemical compounds to add other desirable properties to those which nature has given it. From intimate knowledge of the fiber structure and from thousands of experiments to discover how cotton's natural properties may be modified chemically, science is creating a textile revolution. Here, for example, is an untreated cotton fabric. When it is crumpled in the hand, it stays crumpled. And when it is flattened out, the wrinkles remain. Now, let's see what happens in this laboratory when the textile chemist takes the same fabric and immerses it in a resin of special formula. Resins, there are a great many of them in many combinations, are the compounds by which the chemist adds desirable properties to the fabric. Running the fabric through rollers causes the resin to penetrate into each individual fiber, a process helped along by cotton's natural absorbency. Then the fabric is cured in an oven. Under the influence of heat, the resin becomes a permanent part of the fiber. It will not wash out. Now when the treated fabric is crumpled, it springs back. Smooth and flat. It has been given a durable, wrinkler resistant finish. Other resins give other finishes. Two cotton jackets have been given a good laundering in an automatic washing machine. They are identical except that the fabric of one has been given a special minimum care finish. After the jackets have been allowed to dry, we can see that the untreated jacket, obviously the one on the right, needs ironing before it can be worn, while the treated jacket on the left is ready to be worn immediately. This cotton fabric has been treated to make it highly water repellent. Yet, even though water runs off it as off a duck's back, moisture vapor is able to pass through it. Such a fabric can give bodily comfort and still protect from the elements. By the same token, cotton fabrics can be finished to make them spot resistant, resistant to spilled coffee, for instance. Ink loses its terror for cotton clothing and household fabrics. Soft drinks don't stain, nor does tomato juice. None of the liquids penetrates the fabric, and any that clings to the surface is washed off easily. [Applause] In addition to imparting useful properties, the textile chemist employs his compounds to enhance cotton's attractiveness. He can give permanence to almost any texture, can impart to a cotton fabric almost any hand the consumer may wish. The textile chemist also creates finishes which appeal to the eye. In short, he is opening wide new vistas for textile technology in which the possibilities seem all but limitless. Yes, cotton is a fiber capable of many things. It can be spun into a sturdy fine yarn. It can take and hold the most vivid colors. It can be woven or it can be knitted into virtually any texture. It can be printed in lovely striking designs. can take a host of useful and handsome finishes. And all these qualities together add up to still another. Cotton's loveliness celebrated in many languages around the world. [Music] It's beautiful. Beauty and utility which assures the beauty will endure. And yet these fabrics are but milestones on a long road of achievement. A road which had its beginning in antiquity and which today continues toward the great promises of the future. The plantreeder presses forward his quest for ever improved fibers. Longer, stronger, finer fibers which will extend the horizons of the textile manufacturers. The textile chemist continues working the magic of his test tubes to bring forth fabric performances as yet hardly dreamed of. Thanks to these ever fruitful partnerships with nature, cotton, the fiber which has served mankind so well for 5,000 years, will serve mankind even better as the fiber of tomorrow. Heat. Heat. [Applause]