49 Fun Facts About Cotton

Cotton fibre is almost pure what?

Cellulose makes up the great bulk of raw cotton fibre, and nearly all of it once the fibre is scoured, leaving only traces of waxes, pectins, proteins and water.

What is the protective case in which cotton fibre grows around the seeds called?

A boll is the rounded case that splits open at maturity to expose the fluffy fibre, which in the wild helps the seeds disperse on wind and water.

The cotton genus Gossypium belongs to which group of plants, alongside hibiscus and okra?

The mallows, family Malvaceae, include cotton along with hibiscus, okra and cacao; the greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, then Australia.

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

That in turn derives, ironically, from a Hebrew word for a garment made of linen.

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

Mosul, on the Tigris in present-day Iraq, gave muslin its name through the Italian mussolina; European traders associated the fine cotton cloth with the city.

Roughly what share of world cotton production comes from Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton?

90% of the world's cotton comes from upland cotton, a species native to Mexico and Central America that dominates because of its yield and adaptability.

How many commercially grown species of cotton are there?

Four species are grown commercially: two domesticated in the Americas, including upland cotton, and two Old World species from South Asia and Africa, all tamed in antiquity.

Which extra-long-staple species is sold under names such as Sea Island, Egyptian and Pima?

Gossypium barbadense, named by Linnaeus after Barbados, has the longest and finest fibres of the cultivated cottons; it was first domesticated in northwestern South America.

The oldest known cotton thread in the Old World, strung through eight copper beads, was found at Mehrgarh in which modern country?

Pakistan is home to Mehrgarh, the Neolithic site in Balochistan where the thread preserved inside copper beads was dated to the sixth millennium BC.

What was the quilted cotton armour worn by Aztec warriors called?

Ichcahuipilli, a quilted cotton vest one to two fingers thick, was the standard Aztec body armour; it stopped arrows and obsidian blades so well that Spanish conquistadors adopted it.

Which ancient historian wrote that trees in India bore wool finer than sheep's?

Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, wrote of wild Indian trees whose fruit was a wool surpassing that of sheep in beauty and goodness, an early description of cotton.

Roughly how much does a standard American cotton bale weigh?

About 500 pounds is the standard American bale, 480 pounds net once bagging and ties are excluded; it is compressed at the gin into a dense rectangular block bound with steel ties.

Which of Alexander the Great's contemporaries reported to Seleucus that in India 'there being trees on which wool grows'?

Megasthenes, Seleucus's ambassador to the Mauryan court around 300 BC, recorded the wool-bearing trees in his Indica, probably describing the tree cotton native to the subcontinent.

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

Bengal, centred on Dhaka, was the Mughal Empire's leading cotton region, famed for fine muslin; India held about a quarter of the world's textile trade in the early 18th century.

Which cheap, colourful Indian cloths did the East India Company introduce to Britain in the 1660s, sparking a political storm that lasted decades?

Calico and chintz, printed and painted cottons from India, soon outsold spices among the Company's imports, and Parliament answered with the Calico Acts to protect wool and linen weavers.

In which year were the Calico Acts repealed, triggering a wave of investment in British cotton mills?

1774 was the year the Calico Acts were repealed, freeing British mills to make and sell all-cotton cloth and setting off a boom in mill building and raw-cotton imports.

Who invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire around 1764?

James Hargreaves, a Lancashire weaver, built the jenny about 1764 to spin several threads at once; Arkwright's water frame (1769) and Crompton's mule (1779) followed.

Which English city earned the nickname 'Cottonopolis'?

Manchester, hub of the cotton mills of north-west England, was dubbed Cottonopolis in the 19th century, when its warehouses and surrounding mill towns dominated world cotton spinning and trading.

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?

Handheld roller gins had been used in India since around 500 AD, and the Indian worm-gear gin is still in use today.

Before mechanical gins, roughly how many hours of labour did it take to produce one bale of cotton?

Over 600 hours of hand labour went into a bale when the seeds had to be picked out by hand; the saw gin cut that to roughly a dozen hours per bale.

By the mid-19th century, what royal 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.

Which Frenchman persuaded Muhammad Ali Pasha to grow extra-long-staple cotton in Lower Egypt in the early 19th century?

M. Jumel, a French textile engineer, noticed long-staple plants in a Cairo garden around 1820 and persuaded the Pasha to grow them commercially; the Pasha then monopolised the cotton trade.

According to Gandhi's famous description, Indian labourers picking cotton for British mills were paid how much a day?

Seven cents a day, Gandhi said, was what Indian pickers earned before the cotton was shipped to England, spun and woven in mills, and sold back to India at European prices.

What name did Gandhi give the coarse hand-spun, hand-woven cloth he promoted for India's freedom struggle?

Khadi, hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, became the symbol of swadeshi self-reliance; Gandhi took up the spinning wheel in 1918, and Congress later required its members to spin yarn.

The boll weevil crossed into the United States from Mexico near which Texas town in 1892?

Brownsville, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, is where the weevil entered in 1892; it then spread 40 to 160 miles a year and had reached every cotton-growing region by the 1920s.

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 its name to denim, a contraction of 'serge de Nîmes'; Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss patented riveted denim work trousers in 1873.

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' derives from work shirts made of which cotton fabric?

Cambric, a lightweight plain-weave cotton, was the cloth of the blue work shirts that gave manual workers the 'blue-collar' label; the chambray of today's work shirts is its descendant.

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

Linters, usually under an eighth of an inch long, are removed from the seeds after ginning and go into paper, pulp and the raw material for rayon; in Britain they are also called 'cotton wool'.

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 global average footprint, counting rain and irrigation; in dry parts of India the figure can reach 22,500 litres, which is why cotton is called 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.

By 2011, GM cotton was grown on roughly what share of India's cotton area, the largest in the world?

88% of India's cotton area, 10.6 million hectares, was under Bt varieties by 2011, up from 50,000 hectares when they were first approved in 2002.

Which Chinese region, accused of using forced labour, produces over 20% of the world's cotton?

Xinjiang grows the great majority of China's cotton, roughly a fifth of the world's supply, and forced-labour allegations led Western governments and brands to shun its cotton from 2021.

In January 2019, a cotton seed became the first plant ever to sprout on another world. Which spacecraft carried it?

The lander sits inside the Von Kármán crater on the far side of the Moon.

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

Texas, the leading cotton-growing state by far, with the High Plains around Lubbock at its heart, made cotton its official State Fiber and Fabric in 1997.

Roughly how much of the world's arable land is given over to cotton?

About 2.5% of the world's arable land is planted with cotton, which yields roughly 25 million tonnes, or 110 million bales, of fibre a year.

Which puckered 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'; its alternating smooth and puckered stripes come from weaving some warp threads under slack tension.

Which ancient kingdom's cotton plantations did King Ezana of Aksum boast of destroying?

Meroë, the Kushite capital on the Nile in present-day Sudan, grew and wove cotton; cotton makes up 85% of the textiles found at Classic and Late Meroitic sites.

Why do many growing regions ban naturally coloured varieties of the fibre?

Fear of contaminating the genetics of white crops is the reason: cross-pollination from brown or green varieties can darken a white crop, so many regions keep coloured cotton out; cotton naturally occurs in white, brown, pink and green.

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

An annual is how growers treat it, replanting each spring and destroying the stalks after harvest to deny pests a winter home; it needs a long frost-free season and plenty of sun.

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

Peru's north-coast site of Huaca Prieta yielded the indigo-dyed fragments, reported in 2016; cotton remains from the Nanchoc valley in the same country are older still.

Which country was the world's largest cotton exporter throughout the 2010s?

The USA led cotton exports all decade, shipping roughly a third of the world's traded raw cotton, mostly to mills in Asia; Brazil overtook it in the 2023/24 season.

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

The Aral Sea shrank to a fraction of its 1960 size after the Amu Darya and Syr Darya were diverted to irrigate cotton in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, leaving salt-laden desert.

Cotton bolls found in a cave near which Mexican town have been dated to as early as 5500 BC?

Tehuacán's dry caves, in the same valley where early maize was found, yielded the bolls, though the 5500 BC date has been challenged; upland cotton was domesticated in Mexico by about 3400–2300 BC.