Even most city kids learned in school that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. They maybe also learned that Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper and John Deere the plow.
They likely never heard of Lambert Wilkes.
Dr. Wilkes was a professor in the former Department of Agricultural Engineering at Texas A&M University. Working with Cotton Incorporated's J.K. (Farmer) Jones, Wilkes and a team of TAMU agricultural engineers invented the cotton module builder in 1971. The module builder solved the great logistical bottleneck of cotton ginning by allowing cotton to be harvested quickly and then compressed into large modules.
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