HISTORY OF COTTON |
| The word "cotton" as we know it today originates from the Arabic word "qutun". In Middle Dutch it was also known as "cotton" and with the development of Afrikaans as a spoken language it became "catoen" and eventually "katoen". Nobody knows how long cotton has been in existence. Pieces of cotton boils and cotton cloth more than 7000 years old, have been found in prehistoric caves in Mexico. Three thousand years before the birth of Christ, the Egyptians in the Nile valley were already manufacturing and wearing cotton clothes. At about the same time cotton was also being grown in the valley of the Indus River in Pakistan, being handspun and woven into material by hand. The great philosophers Herodotus and Pliny both mentioned cotton in their writings. In 1793 a certain Eli Whitney, an American, patended the first ginning machine. After he had watched workers on a plantation in Georgia separating the fibre from the seed by hand, he built a machine which could do the same work 50 times faster. He called the machine a "gin", an abbreviation of the word "engine". Today still, the process whereby the fibre is seperated from the seed is known as "ginning". |