A variety of items are made from cotton, from clothing to interior elements. This raw material is one of the most popular in the world, and it is unlikely that synthetic analogues will ever be able to completely displace it from the market. Humanity, however, has long understood that cotton is a valuable thing, and since then it has done a lot to improve this plant culture.
Cotton fabric is the most common in the world. An experienced worker is able to manually collect up to 70-80 kg of cotton per day, but special harvesters at the same time collect ten times more. Warriors of the ancient Roman legions wore cotton clothes. Now cotton is inexpensive, unlike silk, which in Europe has always been very expensive. And in ancient China, cotton was more expensive than silk, because it was considered exotic there. From a ton of cotton, 6-7 hundred pairs of pants can be produced. Cotton seeds are also not waste – they make flour and oil from them.
People spun cotton fabric thousands of years ago, but for the first time spinning machines were adapted to this business in the first half of the 18th century. It happened in the UK. Most cotton in the world is now produced in India. Moreover, in most Indian fields it is still collected manually, as in the old days, since in this country manual labor is cheaper than machine labor. Colored cotton clothes are not necessarily dyed. Colored varieties of this plant have been bred for quite some time. Sometimes over-cultivation of cotton can lead to a real environmental disaster. As this, for example, happened in Uzbekistan – the fields were irrigated too hard, in addition, the plants depleted the soil. As a result, the Aral Sea actually disappeared and dried up. Judging by archaeological finds, people began to grow cotton back in the 5th millennium BC.
Cotton fabric is stronger than wool. In terms of tensile strength, it is almost identical to silk. However, they also have a drawback – cotton is afraid of sunlight. One thousand hours in the light is enough for a cotton fabric to lose half its safety margin and become dilapidated. Unlike most other fabrics, cotton, when wet, becomes stronger, and not vice versa. Cotton is able to absorb so much moisture that it will increase in volume by 35-40%. About 95% of the cotton is cellulose. Therefore, in the Soviet Union, the fabric from this plant was called cotton. Cotton is used in the preparation of explosives.
