flâneur

How two socialist brothers helped automate America’s hardest job

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Revisiting the forgotten inventors of the cotton picker.

You’re reading the first article from our new Issue 15: Work. Subscribe to the print magazine to get future issues delivered to your door. Demonstration of the cotton picker at the Delta Experiment Station, Mississippi, 31 August 1936. Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Memphis Libraries. The sibling inventors had, they claimed, built a machine that experts had considered impossible. It could do the work of dozens of men, at a fraction of the cost. It would not be defeated by knotty situations that had foiled previous machines. It would remake society, this machine, and…

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