47 Fun Facts About Cotton

Cotton fibre is almost pure what?

Cellulose makes up nearly all of a cotton fibre; in 1846 the chemist Christian Schönbein found that dipping cotton in nitric and sulphuric acids turned it into an explosive, guncotton.

Which cotton uniform cloth, first worn by British Indian troops in the 1840s, takes its name from the Urdu for 'dusty'?

Khaki comes from the Urdu khaki, 'dusty'; the Corps of Guides, raised on India's north-west frontier in 1846, wore it because the dull colour hid soldiers against dry, dusty ground.

Cotton belongs to which group of plants, alongside hibiscus and okra?

The mallows, family Malvaceae, also include cacao and the marsh mallow, whose root once went into marshmallow sweets, which makes cotton a cousin of both chocolate and the original marshmallow.

The word 'cotton' comes from which language's word 'qutn'?

Arabic qutn gave English the word by way of Old French coton, because Arab merchants were the ones who carried cotton cloth into medieval Europe.

From which city does the name of the fine cotton cloth muslin derive?

Mosul, in present-day Iraq, is the city dictionaries credit with the cloth's European name, through Italian mussolina and French mousseline, although the most prized muslin was woven far to the east, in India.

Which Tuskegee scientist urged Southern farmers to rotate soil-exhausting cotton with peanuts and sweet potatoes?

George Washington Carver taught that peanuts and other legumes put back the nitrogen that years of cotton had stripped from the soil, and he devised new uses for them, even a peanut milk, so the crops would sell.

Which Arizona people share their name with a premium cotton first bred there in the early 1900s?

The Pima helped raise the trial crops on a government test farm in Arizona, where breeders were developing the cotton from imported seed.

The oldest known cotton fibres in the Old World, preserved inside a copper bead, were found at Mehrgarh in which modern country?

Pakistan's Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site in Balochistan, yielded the fibres, which had mineralised inside the bead's corroding copper; that is how they lasted from the sixth millennium BC.

Which people's warriors wore ichcahuipilli, armour of quilted cotton?

The Aztecs' ichcahuipilli, Nahuatl for 'cotton shirt', packed unspun cotton between layers of cloth so tightly that it could blunt clubs, arrows and obsidian-edged swords.

Which Greek historian of the fifth century BC wrote that trees in India bore wool finer than sheep's?

Herodotus wrote that India's wild trees grew a wool finer than any sheep's, which the Indians wore; German still calls cotton Baumwolle, 'tree wool', a name thought to go back to his report.

Raw cotton is pressed and traded in which unit, standardised in the United States at about 500 pounds?

The bale is made at the gin, where loose fibre is squeezed into a dense block that can be stacked and shipped; the American standard weighs about 500 pounds and is counted as 480 pounds of cleaned cotton.

Which treatment, named after the English chemist who devised it in 1844, soaks cotton in caustic soda to add lustre?

Mercerisation is named after John Mercer, who found that a bath of caustic soda shrinks cotton fibres and leaves them stronger and far readier to take dye.

Which Mughal province was the empire's most important centre of cotton production?

Bengal, centred on Dhaka, wove muslin so sheer that poets called it 'woven air'; under British rule the trade collapsed, and both the craft and the cotton plant it depended on died out.

Which cheap, colourful Indian cloths, imported by the East India Company, proved so popular that Parliament banned them in 1721?

Calico and chintz, printed and painted cottons from India, sold so well that English cloth makers demanded protection; Parliament banned first their import, in 1700, and then the wearing of them.

A 1721 British law banning printed cotton clothes was titled an act to 'preserve and encourage' which two home industries?

Wool and silk makers won the ban after protests that turned violent, with London weavers attacking women in the street for wearing the imported cottons.

Who invented the spinning jenny around 1764?

James Hargreaves, a weaver, built the jenny to spin several threads at once; in 1768 local spinners who feared for their jobs wrecked his machines, and he moved to Nottingham.

Which English city earned the nickname 'Cottonopolis'?

Manchester was so closely tied to the cotton trade that 'manchester' became the everyday word in Australia and New Zealand for household linen such as sheets and pillowcases.

Which American inventor patented the modern cotton gin in 1794?

Eli Whitney's 1794 patent covered a wire-toothed gin that pulled fibre from short-staple seeds; by making upland cotton profitable it drove a huge expansion of slavery in the American South.

What is the word 'gin' in 'cotton gin' short for?

Engine had been clipped to 'gin' since the Middle Ages, when it meant any clever contraption, which is why a snare for catching game is also called a gin.

After the Civil War, which farming system tied many freed families to cotton plantations through a cycle of debt?

Sharecropping gave landless families a plot in return for a share of the crop, often half; they bought food and supplies on credit against the harvest, so a poor year left them owing more than they earned.

By the mid-19th century, what nickname described the fibre's dominance of the Southern American economy?

King Cotton was the slogan of Southern politicians who argued Britain's dependence on the fibre would force it to back their cause; growing it was the main work of enslaved people.

During the American Civil War, the collapse of raw fibre imports caused a depression in North West England known as what?

The Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–65 idled mills and threw hundreds of thousands out of work when the Union blockade, and the Confederacy's own embargo, cut off American cotton.

Which country's cotton boom during the American Civil War ended in bankruptcy in 1876 and British occupation in 1882?

Egypt rode the wartime boom under Khedive Isma'il, who borrowed heavily from European bankers; when cheap American cotton returned, revenues collapsed and British and French creditors took control.

The word 'jeans' comes from the old French name for which Italian port, once a source of sturdy cotton twill?

Genoa was 'Gênes' to the French, and English traders called the tough cloth it shipped 'jean'; only later did the name pass from the fabric to the trousers cut from it.

Which cotton-working device sat at the centre of the flag the Indian National Congress adopted in 1931?

A spinning wheel, the charkha, stood for Gandhi's call to make cloth at home instead of buying it from British mills; when India became independent in 1947 the Ashoka Chakra took its place on the flag.

What is the coarse hand-spun, hand-woven cloth that Gandhi promoted during India's freedom struggle called?

Khadi was Gandhi's answer to imported mill cloth: he asked Indians to make and wear their own homespun as swadeshi, goods 'of one's own country', turning a plain fabric into a badge of the freedom movement.

The boll weevil crossed from Mexico into the United States in 1892 by which town near the Rio Grande's mouth?

Brownsville is near where the weevil crossed in 1892; within about thirty years it had infested the whole cotton South, collapsing land values and sending many farm workers north to factory cities.

The citizens of which Alabama town erected a monument to the boll weevil in 1919?

Enterprise, in Coffee County, unveiled its monument to the weevil in 1919, crediting the pest with forcing local farmers to diversify away from cotton into crops such as peanuts.

Denim takes its name from which French city?

Nîmes gave denim its name, from 'serge de Nîmes'; in 1873 the tailor Jacob Davis and his cloth supplier Levi Strauss patented metal rivets to stop the pockets of work trousers tearing.

In classic indigo denim, which yarns are dyed blue?

The warp only is dyed with indigo, while the weft is left undyed, which is why jeans are blue on the outside and predominantly white on the inside.

The term 'blue-collar' comes from the blue work shirts of manual labourers, typically sewn from denim or which lighter cotton cloth?

Chambray, a light plain-woven cotton, shared denim's blue, a colour that suited manual work because it hid the dirt and grease that a white office shirt would show.

What are the fine, silky fibres that cling to cotton seeds after ginning called?

Linters are the short fuzz the gin leaves on the seed; a second, gin-like machine shaves them off, and they end up in goods from mattress stuffing to paper and photographic film.

Which toxic pigment found throughout the cotton plant makes cottonseed meal unsuitable for animals with simple stomachs?

Gossypol, a yellow polyphenol in the seeds and whole plant, is tolerated by ruminants but not by pigs or poultry; refined cottonseed oil is safe, and the compound has been studied as a male contraceptive.

On average, roughly how much water does it take to produce one kilogram of cotton fibre?

8,000–10,000 litres per kilogram is the usual global estimate, and India's crop averages more than twice that, which is why cotton is known as a thirsty crop.

Bt cotton is genetically modified to produce a natural insecticide from a gene taken from what?

A soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, supplies the gene; its Cry toxin kills moth and butterfly larvae such as bollworm while sparing most other creatures.

Which American seed giant brought insect-resistant Bt cotton to India in 2002 through a venture with Mahyco?

Monsanto's venture saw Bt cotton spread to 88% of India's cotton area by 2011, but a 2020 study found that one pest had since grown resistant and farmers were spending more on pesticides than before it arrived.

Which Chinese region, accused of using forced labour, grew about a fifth of the world's cotton around 2020?

Xinjiang grows most of China's cotton; after reports that Uyghurs were forced to pick it, the United States banned imports of its cotton in January 2021 and brands such as H&M said they would stop using it.

Which spacecraft carried the cotton seed that in January 2019 became the first plant to sprout on another world?

China's Chang'e 4 carried the seed in a sealed canister on its lander; the experiment was ended after nine days, when the canister's temperature could no longer be controlled, and the sprout died.

Which US state designated cotton its official 'State Fiber and Fabric' in 1997?

Texas honoured a crop that had moved west within the state: over the twentieth century cotton shifted from East and Central Texas to the irrigated High Plains around Lubbock.

The United States prints which everyday item on a blend of three-quarters cotton and one-quarter linen?

Banknotes in the United States are printed on paper that is 75% cotton and 25% linen, with tiny red and blue fibres scattered through it to make the notes harder to counterfeit.

Which cotton fabric takes its name from a Persian phrase meaning 'milk and sugar'?

Seersucker takes its name from the Persian shir o shakar, 'milk and sugar', a nod to its alternating smooth and bumpy stripes, made by weaving some threads at slack tension.

King Ezana of Aksum boasted of destroying cotton in the lands of which Nile kingdom, in what is now Sudan?

Meroë was the Kushite capital; Ezana's inscription tells of his army burning villages and hurling the people's grain and cotton into the river, and the kingdom of Kush collapsed around AD 350.

Cotton is naturally a perennial but is usually grown as what, to help control pests?

An annual: growers replant each spring and, soon after harvest, shred the old stalks so that pests have less to feed on over the winter.

Indigo-dyed cotton fragments up to 6,000 years old were found at Huaca Prieta in which country?

Peru's Huaca Prieta yielded the blue-dyed cotton scraps, reported in 2016; they are about 1,500 years older than the earliest indigo-dyed cloth known from the Old World.

Which country overtook the United States in the 2023/24 season to become the world's largest cotton exporter?

Brazil shipped more cotton than the United States in 2023/24 after a record harvest, while drought in the American Southwest shrank the US crop.

Soviet-era irrigation for cotton drained which inland sea, leaving widespread salination?

The Aral Sea shrank to a fraction of its former size after Soviet planners turned the rivers that fed it onto cotton fields; its fisheries collapsed, and the old fishing fleet lies rusting in the desert at Moynaq.

Which absorbent cotton fabric is standard for bath towels and robes?

Terrycloth is woven with uncut loops of thread standing off one or both faces, and those loops are what let a towel soak up so much water.