Hundreds of patents were issued for machines to harvest cotton before John and Mack Rust applied for their first in 1928. Promising designs, like the Rusts’, incorporated spindles, prongs, or “fingers.” Unsuccessful ones included those that used pneumatic power or electrostatic charges to remove fiber from cotton bolls.
The first machines to show actual promise were developed by Angus Campbell, a Canadian who worked in Chicago and Pittsburgh.
Campbell, a pattern maker who began tinkering with picker designs after visiting Texas in 1885, was issued a patent in 1895 for a machine that used revolving spindles, a basic component of successful pickers today.
With financial backing from New York City cotton dealer Theodore H. Price, Campbell was confident enough to test five of his machines in a widely publicized demonstration at Waxahatchie, Texas, in 1910.
Farmers who observed Campbell’s machine in action — it picked cotton, but poorly — remained skeptical.
The machines were complicated and expensive — and less efficient than exploiting the unskilled labor that was abundant in much of the South. That wouldn’t begin to change until the 1940s, when war production — and intolerable conditions for Black people in the segregated South — accelerated the Great Migration.
Arthur Page, in the December 1910 edition of The World’s Work magazine, wrote: “Even after they had seen it, they felt as the old woman on first seeing a hippopotamus. She walked around it several times, viewing it carefully, and finally remarked decisively: ‘There ain’t no such thing.’”
Campbell died in 1911 at the age of 59 — well before he saw his work form the basis of future inventions. Farm implement maker International Harvester bought the Price-Campbell patents in 1924, then spent the next two decades, off and on, perfecting the design.
In 1942, Harvester announced it had a picker ready for production, and its first market-ready machines would roll off assembly lines in Memphis in 1949.
Another inventor of note was Hiram N. Berry, an auto dealer in Greenville, Mississippi, who designed a picker in 1921 with rotating barbed spindles.
Berry, who was issued his first patent in 1925, had critical financial support from Greenville surgeon Hugh A. Gamble and Pittsburgh investor Albert M. Hanauer, who became president of the Cotton Harvester Corporation.
After Berry’s death in 1928 at the age of 50, his son Charles continued work on the machine. Hanauer was unhappy with the initial results, saying the machines were “belt driven, scattered oil all around, required constant nursing and took a long time to repair.”
The redesigned Hanauer-Gamble-Berry cotton picker was demonstrated in 1930 at the Delta Experiment Station in Stoneville, Mississippi. But like all the mechanical pickers that were tested in the 1930s, the machines gathered too much trash, lowering the grade, and left too much cotton behind. But the machines were getting better.
After Harvester announced, amid the acute labor shortages of World War II, that it would begin commercial production, other manufacturers moved quickly to develop their own mechanical pickers. In 1943, Deere & Co. acquired the Berry patents. And in 1944, Allis-Chalmers reached out to John Rust about his patents.
Among other early efforts to build a successful mechanical cotton picker were at least three with connections to St. Louis.
John S. Thurman (1868-1939), an early inventor of vacuum cleaners (he gave us “pneumatic carpet renovation” in 1898), tried to build a cotton picker that would vacuum cotton fibers off the bolls. He called his St. Louis-based company the Vacuum Cotton Harvester Company.
In 1908, Thurman set up public demonstration of an early version of his picker by transplanting a patch of “very dry and badly handled” cotton, imported from Brownsville, Texas, in a St. Louis baseball park at Grand and Laclede. “Fully a thousand people witnessed the exhibition,” the Post-Dispatch reported.
In the mid-1930s, Memphis inventor Louis C. Stukenborg (1881-1969) put what he called his “St. Louis Cotton Picker” on the market. The first picker was built in 1936 by the St. Louis Car Company, which made street cars.
Another company contracted with St. Louis automobile manufacturer Moon Motor Car Company to produce light gasoline-powered machines that used rotary blades and suction in the picker-heads. The American Cotton Picker Corporation, launched by GM founder W.C. Durant (1861-1947), built about 500 of the machines, but had the misfortune of launching at the onset of the Great Depression. Most of the St. Louis-made machines were sold to the Soviet Union, which was interested in mechanized cotton harvesting. (Moon Motor failed in 1930.) — © 2026 Roland Klose. All rights reserved.
Correction (Jan. 29, 2026): Fixed spelling of Cotton Harvester Corporation.
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