The Bluffton news. [volume] (Bluffton, Ohio) 1875-current, 1940-06-27
How Machinery Is Transforming
This Once Agricultural State

city limits.
No need for enforcing such laws
now, when for every 500-pound bale
of cotton the planter may sell an
average of 900 pounds of seed
for about $l8.
All around Jackson's "hoop
skirts" as someone aptly called the
outlying industrial belt, tall, circu-
lar warehouses with conical metal
tops rise like the oasthouses OF
Kent's hop-growing districts.
Each seed house stores 5000 tons
or so of cottonseed which awaits the
mechanical alchemy that will con-
vert its parts into horse collars, salad
dressing, blotting paper, cheese
crackers, house roofing, and an
amazing variety of other products.
Should you be listening to re-
cording of Lawrence Tibbett's voice
or Guy Lombardo's orchestra, you
will be indebted to the velvety cot
tonseed for ingredients in the phono-
graph record.
The seeds pour first into huge
machines which whirl, shake,
screen, and pull out all the dirt and
foreign particles. The clean seed
goes to delinters where the lint fiber
is removed and collected to help
make felt, absorbent cotton, mat
tresses, and even underwear.
The kernels, or meats, emerge
from a steam-jacketed cooker into
hydraulic presses which squeeze out
the oil that will be used to pack
sardines, make butter substitutes,
soap, and cooking oils. The cakes
remaining in the powerful hydraulic
presses are removed and broken up
to feed cattle and rejuvenate the
soil.
Slot Cakes" Wrapped in Hair.
Negroes, stripped to the waist,
deftly handle the literal "hot
cakes" wrapping them for the
presses into mats made of human
hair from China, which best with
stands the high temperatures.
The odor from the presses is like
that of hot buttered toast. At lunch
time you see the workers dip their
bread into the dripping oil, and eat
the oil-spread slices with evident
relish.
Enter a bathroom of an ocean
liner and you encounter Mississip-
pi composition board; stroll along
Atlantic City's boardwalk or go
aboard some British man-of-war
and your feet tread the states yell
low-pine planks; contract a cold in
London, Australia or Argentina and
your prescription is apt to contain
pine oil extracted from Mississippi
stumps; buy gasoline as you tour
Italy or Japan and it may have been
bleached by a distinctive product,
bentonite, from the state some
people call provincial.
A plant at Jackson hauls in each
week some 800 tons of bentonite,
mined in Smith county. The soft,
porous clay, sleek as an alligator's S
belly, product of ash from volcanic
eruptions of bygone geologic times,
is dumped from car to conveyor
belt, mixed into slurry, and treat
| ed with acids.
You must climb a high platform
to see the giant drum, covered with
| fine cloth, which draws the water
content through screen as it re-
wolves, permitting the residue cake
to be scraped from the outside.
A glass-bottle works at Jackson
best illustrates Mississippi as q
customer of many states and for
eign lands.
Tons of old bottles from every.
where are piled high in the yard to
be carried on moving belts to crush.
ers, then to be mixed with sand
from Arkansas, salt cake from
Chile, lime from Ohio. barium from
Missouri, feldspar from Colorado
arsenic from Montana. and sele
Mum from Canada, to make enough
bottles every day to supply one fol
each white family in the state.
You can look, but not too long
through colored glasses into fur
naces where these products anc
others from huge bins are melted
by natural-gas flames at 2,700 de
grees Fahrenheit.
Seventy tons of raw materials ART
shoveled out of the bins for eacl
days production Of about quarter
million bottles. Out they go, in car
load lots, toward their ultimate des
tinations on drugstore shelves. cos
metic counters, nocturnal milk wag
L = L
parlor tables.