50 Fun Facts About Cotton

Cotton fibre is almost pure what?

It carries only minor traces of waxes, fats, pectins and water.

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

In the wild the fluffy fibre helps the plant disperse its seeds.

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

The greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, followed by Australia and Africa.

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.

Which country is the world's largest producer of cotton?

India and China each grow around 17 to 18 million tonnes a year, mostly for their own textile industries; the US is the biggest exporter.

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

It is native to Central America and Mexico; the extra-long-staple species supplies just over 5%.

How many commercially grown species of cotton are there?

Two are New World species and two Old World, all domesticated in antiquity.

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

Linnaeus named it for the cotton he encountered in Barbados, though its native range is Colombia to Peru.

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

It dates to the sixth millennium BC; cotton bolls from a Mexican cave are dated to 5500 BC.

How much cotton did the peoples between the Río Santiago and Río Balsas send their Aztec rulers as tribute each year?

Domestication of upland cotton in Mexico dates to between about 3400 and 2300 BC.

Which ancient historian's claim that Indian trees grew wool led medieval Europeans to imagine plant-borne sheep?

Several Germanic languages still name the fibre as if it grew on trees, and John Mandeville wrote in 1350 of a tree bearing tiny lambs.

What does the German word for cotton, Baumwolle, literally mean?

Northern Europeans knew only that the imported fibre came from a plant, and assumed it was a tree.

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

He was probably describing tree cotton, Gossypium arboreum, native to the subcontinent.

Which Mughal province, centred on Dhaka, was the empire's most important centre of cotton production?

India held about a quarter of the global 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?

They soon outsold spices, and Parliament passed the Calico Act of 1700 to protect wool and linen weavers.

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

Demand for raw cotton doubled within a couple of years and kept doubling every decade into the 1840s.

Who invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire around 1764?

Arkwright's water frame followed in 1769 and Crompton's mule in 1775; Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 had created the yarn shortage.

Which English city earned the nickname 'Cottonopolis'?

Arkwright opened the world's first steam-driven textile mill there in 1781, and by 1871 the region used 32% of global cotton.

Which American inventor patented the modern cotton gin in 1794?

He hoped it would cut labour, but by making cotton profitable it drove a huge expansion of slavery to pick the crop.

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?

The gin Whitney manufactured cut that to about a dozen hours per bale.

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

Cultivating and harvesting it became the leading occupation of enslaved people in the United States.

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

The Confederacy had also deliberately cut exports, hoping to force Britain to recognise it.

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

Viceroy Isma'il borrowed heavily from European bankers, and traders abandoned Egyptian cotton once cheap American exports returned.

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

The Pasha granted himself a monopoly on the sale and export of cotton and ordered it grown in preference to other crops.

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

The raw cotton sailed three weeks to England, was woven in Lancashire 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?

The first piece was made at his Sabarmati Ashram in 1917-18, and Congress members later had to spin cotton themselves.

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

By the mid-1920s it had reached every cotton-growing region, spreading 40 to 160 miles a year.

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

They credited the pest with forcing them to diversify away from cotton into crops such as peanuts.

By 1922, roughly what share of America's cotton crop was the boll weevil destroying each year?

The failure of the South's main crop became one impetus for the Great Migration and even the Harlem Renaissance.

Denim takes its name from which French city where it was first produced?

'Denim' is a contraction of 'sergé de Nîmes'; Jacob Davis made the first riveted denim trousers in 1873.

In classic indigo denim, which yarns are dyed blue?

That is why jeans are predominantly white on the inside.

The term 'blue-collar' derives from work shirts made of which cotton fabric?

Terrycloth goes into towels, denim into jeans, and cotton is preferred for sheets because it is hypoallergenic.

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

Usually under an eighth of an inch long, they go into paper and pulp; in Britain they are called 'cotton wool'.

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

Ruminants can eat the meal, and the refined oil is fine for humans; the compound also appears to inhibit sperm.

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

In some dry parts of India the figure can reach 22,500 litres, which is why it is called a thirsty crop.

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

Bacillus thuringiensis 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?

That was 10.6 million hectares, up from 50,000 in 2002.

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

Cotton was first grown in China in Yunnan during the Han dynasty.

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?

Large cotton farms remain in California, Arizona and the Deep South.

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

World production is about 25 million tonnes, or 110 million bales, a year.

Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by a confectioner and a man of which unlikely profession?

William Morrison and John Wharton sold 68,655 boxes of 'Fairy Floss' at the 1904 World's Fair.

Which cotton-producing kingdom on the Middle Nile, whose plantations King Ezana of Aksum boasted of destroying, was known for its textiles?

Cotton makes up 85% of the textiles found at Classic and Late Meroitic sites, preserved by the arid climate.

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

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?

It needs a long frost-free season, plenty of sun and 50 to 100 cm of rain or irrigation.

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

Even older Gossypium barbadense remains from the same country's Nanchoc District date to the 7th-6th millennia BC.

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

Its raw-cotton sales ran about $4.9 billion a year in the late 2010s, against roughly $2.1 billion for all of Africa; Brazil overtook it in the 2023/24 season.

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

Poor cropping and irrigation practices have also caused desertification in parts of Uzbekistan, where cotton is a major export.

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

The domestication of upland cotton in Mexico is dated to between about 3400 and 2300 BC.